THE LEONAIS.
IF a line be drawn on the map of France almost due south from the mouth of the Rance to St. Nazaire on the Loire, and the place-names on either side of it be compared, it will be found that nearly all those to the west of such a line begin with " Tre," " Ker," "Lan," or "Pion," while to the east of it very few will be discovered commencing with those character-
istic syllables. The narrowness, indeed, of what may be termed the nomenclatorial border-strip that runs along the irregular frontiers of the two Departments Ile-et- Vilaine and Loire Inferieure, into which the Breton marches are divided, is strikingly illustrative of the sharp contrast which Lower Brittany still exhibits to the rest of France, as well as indicative of the comparatively recent period at which the land of Union and bra yen became incorporated with the dominions of the Most Christian King. The gaiety of the Gaul—the Frenchman is still known as " Gallek," in Bretagne—is replaced by the silent gravity of the round-headed, black -haired descendant of the Six Tribes, the vine hardly ripens north-west of the Loire, the sunny plains of Tonraine and the rich pastures of Normandy • are exchanged for the heathery landes and boggy hollows of high
granitic plateaus, where scanty crops of potatoes and buckwheat can alone be raised, under the constant rains that the west winds blow in from the ocean. The conformation of the coast is as characteristic as the surface-sculpture of the interior. From St. Mak round to St. Nazaire the shore-line is indented to an extent seen nowhere else in France. Deep bays are enclosed within far-jutting headlands, up creeks and estuaries the tide surges into the very midst of corn-fields, and washes the thresholds of inland farmhouses, while a barrier of islands serves as some defence against the tempestuous flood of the Atlantic.
Everywhere the Celtic race seems to live under similar physical
conditions, and the Breton, like his cousin of the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland, is half a sailor, half a tiller of the soil. This very amphibiousness, perhaps, prevents his attaining excellence in either industry; the Celt has never in his original home proved a good farmer or an enterprising seaman. Of this unique Celtic land, unique as the last dwelling-place of the pure Celtic race on the continent of Europe, the characteristic social features are rapidly becoming effaced. What centuries of French domination were unable to effect, a few decades of railway enterprise are silently bringing about. The costume is disappearing, garment by garment, the ancient game of souls is but seldom to be witnessed, the guerz are rarely chanted, and the solemn dances on the sea-shore are already almost things of the past. Granite crosses and finely sO'ulptured calvaries of the same time-defying material attest the piety of former days, and the traveller is never long out of sight of some exquisitely-designed clocker, or towering cathedral spire. But it is in the villages only that the men will be seen at mass ; in the towns, as in the rest of France, the congregations consist almost wholly of women. The language will be the last characteristic of the Breton to disappear, but go it mast, in time ; French only is allowed to be taught in the schools, or spoken in the army, and no Eistedfodds exist to maintain the one Celtic dialect, still spoken out of the Queen's dominions, as an element of culture.
The megalithic antiquities of southern Brittany have at- tracted the majority of visitors to what is, probably, the least Celtic portion of the Duchy. These huge monuments—temples, tombs, or fortresses—seem to have been the work of an Iberian or Basque, rather than of a Celtic people. The dolmens that are scattered over the surface of the three Departments of Fmistere, Cotes du Nord, and Morbihan, but which are,, most numerous in the last-mentioned, are often termed in Breton ti- er corriganet, or dwarfs' dwellings, and it is hardly likely that such a name would be given to their constructions by the early Celia themselves, who were a tall race, or by their descendants. The Basques of the present day are a small-statured race, and so are the Eskimo, with whom they appear to be allied. These remains, too, were certainly regarded as antiquities in Roman times, and the Celtic immigration into western Europe did not, probably, take place further back than a few centuries before the Christian era. Of the four dioceses into which Lower Brit- tany was formerly divided, that of Leon, corresponding roughly with the northern half of Finistere, is the most interesting, especially to Englishmen, from any but a merely prehistorical point of view. Of the builders of Curiae we may guess much, but we shall never know more than a very little, notwithstand- ing Mr. Miln's exhaustive researches and careful admeasure- meats. But in the cathedral of St. Pol de Leon, the clocher of Creisker, the triumphal arch of Thegonnec, the calvaries of Guimiliau and Plougastel, we read the Eesthetic and religious history of a people in whom Englishmen cannot but feel a peculiar interest. For there can be little doubt that a considerable proportion of the present inhabitants of the Leonais are the descendants of British (Welsh, Cornish, or Devonian) immigrants of the fourth and succeeding centuries. All along the shores of northern Brittany the towns seem to have begun as aggregations round a priestly rather than a military foundation. As Brother Albert le Grand tells us, in his "Vie, Gestes, Mort, et Miracles des Saints de la Bretagne- Armorique," many, perhaps most, of these religious town-makers were British apostles. St. Malo owed its origin in the sixth century to a British saint, Malon or Maclou (Macleod); St. Brieuc to St. Briek, in the fifth century. Dol itself, a frontier town of importance in the days of William the Conqueror, is said to have been founded by Riwal, a Devonian prince; aId Of St. Renan, an Irish saint, the memory is preserved in the name of a town in Finistere. The very seat of the Bishop, St. Pol de Leon, was founded by a British missionary, who bore the Roman name of Aurelian, and after displaying proofs of sanctity in his own country, had been commanded by an angel to cross the Channel and preach the Gospel in Brittany, where he built a large number of churches, and died, a centenarian, in 594. The famous cathedral is said to cover the burial-place of Conan Meriadec, a Pictish chief, who, following the Emperor Maximus into Gaul towards the close of the fourth century, founded Aleth, now St. Servan, and ended by becoming ruler of all Armorica. The dialect of the Leonais is asserted to be the purest form of Breton, which on examination turns out to be little more than softened Welsh. Many words are absolutely identical in the two languages, and the grammatical terminations of Brezonnek are merely worn-down repetitions of those of Welsh. It is* possible enough that, as some recent writers maintain, the insular Britons and the continental Bretons were different peoples ; but however this may have been, the British im- migrants of the earlier centuries of our era undoubtedly con- stituted a preponderating, though probably not hostile element, in influence, if not in numbers, in the northern half of ancient Armorica. The town of St. Pol has a sleepy look, as if conscious of having earned repose by the erection of its fine cathedral,--one of the few in France completely finished by the middle of the fifteenth century-Land of the ex- quisitely-proportioned and elaborately-decorated Clocher de Creisker, the ascription of which to an English architect is so indignantly scouted by the patriotic Joanne. Visitors should not omit to ascend the clocher,—the view of the entire Roscoff peninsula, dotted with white-walled, blue-roofed villages and tall, slender spires, with Enez Baz beyond it, and on either . side an iron-bound, rugged, precipitous coast, hollowed out into endless deep bays, bordered by glittering strips of yellow sand, and enclosed between jagged capes and points of every conceivable form, often ending in a sort of pro- cession of joinnacled rocks, against which the blue sea breaks incessantly in rings of encircling surf, will amply repay the exertion. One may very well walk from one end of the town to the other without meeting half a dozen persons, and it is not easy to imagine bow its seven thousand inhabitants manage to gain a 'livelihood: Yet there is a well-to-do air about it, and it is possible that the railway recently opened to Roacoff may lend it animation, as well as add to its• prosperity. Next to Brest, which we have only space to mention here, Morlaix is the most important town in the L6onais. Nothing can be more picturesque than its ; street after street of white-walled, blue-ro3fed houses, occupying either slope of a deep ravine, crossed below by the immense granite viaduct of the Brest Railway, nearly two hundred feet above the pavement. The view from the old ramparts looking westwards over the Queffleut towards the Church of St. Martin des Champs is one of the finest of the kind in Brittany. The arrangement of blue and white, characteristic of Breton towns, harmonises singularly well with the greenery amid which the many-gabled houses, with their high-pitched roofs, are nestled. The town is fall of old houses, and such streets as the Rue des Nobles and the Grande Rue are almost what they were when the "Dnchesse Anne," who seems to have honoured every town in the Duchy by residence at some time or other, gave her hand to Charles VIII. and her dominions to the French Crown.
At the period of the present writer's visit, the town was full of Raervistes, most of whom seemed miserable enough, but, despite the somewhat bellicose tenor of its punning motto, " S'ils le irtordent, mords-1e8 !" the irruption merely lent an increased animation to the streets. The Bretons are a peaceful, courteous, kindly folk, rather too fond of trots-six, and a little given to trickery. The virtue of cleanliness they have not yet learnt to appreciate, and in Breton towns and villages the vilest smells assail you at every turn. They are, however, industrious and frugal ; as in Wales, the peasant-women knit as they walk. The small proprietors seem for the most part very poor, beggars are numerous, though not very importunate, and even the able- bodied are not ashamed to ask for a copper. In the country the priests and the resident " noblesse " still maintain much of their old prestige and authority, but the people of the larger towns are distinctly Republican, rather, perhaps, from a sentiment of opposition than from any fervent admiration of the Republican principle. The Leonais was formerly the most subject to clerical influence, of the four dioceses. Souvestre says that so great was the number of crosses in it, that to re- place those thrown down during the Revolution would have cost £40,000. The land is still more thickly covered with churches than any other portion of the duchy. The explanation of these facts, however, may lie in its earlier evangelisation, and 'especially in its greater fertility and wealth. The Ldonais has a greater extent of coast and a smaller proportion of mountain and moor land than any of the three other dioceses. Under these -circumstances, the success which has rewarded the efforts of a Baptist mission, established some years ago at Morlaix, is the more remarkable. In the town and its neighbourhood seven places of worship have been opened, the services at which, 'conducted in Breton as well as in French, are numerously at- tended. M. le Pasteur Jenkins is a thorough master of the Breton language, and it is touching to witness the fervour with which Breton translations of Baptist hymns are sung to Moody and Sankey tunes, the simple trustfulness with which the words of the preacher are listened to by congregations invited to con- aider for themselves the truths of Christianity, in lieu of receiving their religion shaped and fashioned for them by a sacerdotal elass.
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