The Night of Fires, and other Breton Studies. By Anatole
le Bras. Put into English by Frances M. Pestling. (Chapman and Hall, lb. net.)—M. is Bras, himself a Breton, is an acknowledged authority on all that concerns Brittany and its people, and Mrs. Gostling has no small independent knowledge of the subject and of kindred matters, and has already brought within the reach of the English reader an earlier work of M. is Bras, "The Land of Pardons." It is not often that an author has a translator so competent to do the very best for him. The book as a whole is more than tinged with melancholy. It is an illustration from beginning to end of what the translator says in his Preface. "The Breton finds him- self constantly at a disadvantage in this work-a-day, practical world, and so has gradually acquired the habit of living half in the unseen." The "Night of Fires" is the old pagan custom of the midsummer fires which has boon not very thoroughly Chris- tianized, being turned to a commemoration of the dead, not without a certain magical reference to the living. " Tho Night of the Dead " is a local adaptation of the All Hallows solemnity known throughout Christendom. In" The Child of Tann" and "A Summer Funeral" the same note is dominant. "Christmas in Iceland" is a very strange story of the Iceland fishermen—Iceland is now what New- foundland used to be to those people. It reminds us somehow of the "Ancient Mariner." As we might expect, there frequently occurs as we read a survival of pagan beliefs. The Bretons are " good Catholics," but there is not a little paganism among them. —We may take the opportunity of mentioning at the same time a book by the translator which has been in long waiting for notice. This is Rambles Around French Châteaux by Frances M. Gostling (Mills and Boon, 6s.) It comes with a recommenda- tion from a French authority. It is only a part of a great subject that has been dealt with—imagine a volume which should include all the historic houses of France !—but "the lino of travel is well shown : it takes us through the most central regions, follows the most picturesque routes, takes us to our most characteristic towns, and to the chtlteaux of which France is most proud." Nor is this praise undeserved, as we see when we examine the volume itself. How full of significance are the names, to take a few out of many, of Avignon, Vaucluse, Tarascon, Arles, Nimes, Montpellier, and Chinon 1 The book is made still more attractive by the illus- trations. Four of these aro in colour. The frontispiece, "Sortie do in Grande Masse," by M. L. Lehle, gives us the church of S Trophime at Arles, with a hint of the beauty of the Arlesiennes and throe others, "At the Fountain" and scones at Carcassonne and Toulouse, by M. C. R. Andreae. And there are thirty-three reproductions of photographs, among them a full-length figure of the poet Mistral.
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