18 THE LANDSCAPES OF BKITTANY. 



of a vast desolate plain, where a few lean sheep crop an insufficient 

 food from the scanty herbage, and whose sole product is turf. " This 

 country," says Jules Janin,* " has no other harvest, no other wealth 

 than its peat ; neither fruit, nor flowers, nor corn, nor pastures, nor 

 repose, nor well-being ; the earth is wild, the sky one of iron. It is 

 a region of stagnant waters, pestiferous exhalations, decrepit men, 

 famished animals." 



The swampy levels of Montoir form the natural vestibule to the 

 Armorican Peninsula, which of all the French provinces has the 

 longest ajid the most vigorously withstood the advance of civilization, 

 its ideas, and its modern institutions, and has the most rigidly preserved 

 its primitive character. There are many nooks and corners in Brit- 

 tany scarcely changed in outward aspect or inner life since the remote 

 days when it was a valued appanage of the English crown. They seem 

 to have been plunged in a sleep of centuries, from which the shrill 

 whistle of the steam-engine is only just awakening them. The 

 country is undulating and broken ; in the central districts it assumes 

 quite a mountainous character. It is true that its heights are only 

 of moderate elevation, the loftiest not exceeding 2000 feet ; but they 

 are barren, rude, and sombre in appearance. The coast is picturesque 

 enough to delight the most zealous artist, bordered with high and 

 abrupt cliffs, and lined, as it were, with a beach where the waters of 

 the Channel ever break in floods of spray and foam, and where masses 

 of rock lie scattered of immense size and the most fantastic forms. 



Geologically speaking, Brittany may be regarded as a prolongation 

 of our English mountains, to which, like all the north-west coast of 

 France, they were anciently united. In some remote era a vast 

 convulsion opened in the solid land a chasm through which the 

 oceans poured their meeting waters, and separated our beloved island 

 from the European continent ; the sole condition under which, per- 

 haps, it was possible for the English people to have accomplished 

 their destiny. Anchored amid the protecting seas, we are able to 

 regard from afar, like a watchman from a tower, the convulsions that 

 * Jules Janin, " La Bretagne" (ed. Paris, 1845), c. xvii. 



