DESCRIPTION OP BBITTANT. 19 



character and sanguinary in spirit. They are covered with its gray 

 memorials : the masses of granite of different shapes known as Maen- 

 hirs, or 'long stones,' and peulvens, -which appear to have been 

 employed as sepulchral monuments ; dolmens, or ' table-stones ;' and 

 cromlechs (crom, bowed or bending, and lech, a stone), which anti- 

 quaries are now agreed to regard as the remains of the ancient 

 cemeteries or burial places. At Camae, near Quiberon Bay, may be 

 seen a truly remarkable example of the Parallelitha, or avenues of 

 upright stones, forming five parallel rows, which extend for miles 

 over the dreary moorland. "What were their uses it is impossible to 

 determine, for there seems little ground to believe, as some writers 

 would have us believe, that they were ' serpent temples,' where the 

 old Ophite worship was celebrated. We can only gaze at them in 

 wonder : mile upon mile of gray lichen -stained stones, some twenty 

 feet high, laboriously fashioned, and raised in their present places by 

 the hand of man some twenty centuries agone. 



" On these very dolmens, where the priests of the Tentates were 

 wont to immolate their human victims to their unknown god, the 

 mediaeval sorcerers and sorceresses celebrated the Black Mass, or 

 Mass of Satin, in terrible burlesque of the Roman Catholic sacrament, 

 concocted their abominable philtres, and performed their dreary 

 incantations. Alas for human nature ! In every age it is a prey to 

 the wildest credulity. Even in the present day more than one 

 superstition hovers around the monuments of the Celtic epoch. 

 The Bretons believe them haunted by demons called poulpiquets, who 

 love to make sport of the passing stranger, but will sometimes give 

 both counsel and encouragement to those who know how to address 

 them in the prescribed formulas ; who, like the Ladye in the ' Lay of 

 the Last Minstrel,' at their bidding can bow 



' The viewles3 forms of air.' 



For, in the Breton mind, the superstitions of Druidism have not been 

 wholly uprooted by the teachings of Christianity, still less by those 

 of science and reason. Many a dark and dismal legend flourishes in 

 the lonely recesses of the landes. 



" Brittany, like England, has its CornouaiUe, or Cornwall, and it 

 is here, particularly in North Cornwall, that we see it under its most 

 desolate aspect, with its chains of black treeless hills covered with 

 heath and furze ; with its deserts of broom and fern, its ruins scat- 

 tered along the winding roads, its attenuated herds wandering at their 

 will across the moors, and its savage, ignorant, and scanty population. 



