382 
A French Haras and Horse Fair. 
Count is not only " un veritable ami. die cheval," but also an 
accomplished coachman, and he is said, and I believe justly said, 
to be the most popular man in all Brittany. 
Brittany, the north-western peninsula of France, is not 
mountainous, but remarkable on account of rugged physical 
features and tracts of moor, over which are liberally scattered 
melancholy monuments of forgotten times : there are beautiful 
valleys, traversed by full and flowing rivers, smiling upland 
pastureland, and rich lowland meadows, together with, near the 
sea, a tract of wonderfully rich vegetable-growing soil. Agri- 
culture is backward, the enclosures are small, the hedges and 
banks well timbered, and the country generally well wooded. 
The earth-hungry Celtic people are philoprogenitive, conserva- 
tive, and superstitious, speaking the Celtic language, and affect- 
ing in their peculiar costumes loudish colouring, such as red, 
violet, and blue. The law — le morcellement — together with the 
race-instincts of the people, has reduced, and is reducing, many 
properties to almost intangible proportions.' The climate re- 
sembles our own, and the generally firm and igneous geological 
formation of this little Scotland, without its mountains, together 
with other surroundings, render much of the country well 
adapted for the purposes of horse-breeding. 
That ever famous farmer-penman Aithur Young made the 
tour of Brittany in 1787, exactly 100 years before my visit. 
Arther Young's quarto volumes are therefore admirable his- 
torical landmarks — true photographs of the old order — by which 
to estimate a century's progress. In France, he says, you pass 
from beggary to profusion — there are no degrees — there is 
nothing in Brittany but privilege and poverty. The farms are 
minute ; the skill in agriculture is no better than that of the 
Huron Indians ; in the towns there are heaps of dirt, no glass 
in the windows, no light ; the inns are poor holes. As for the 
people, the men — the Celtic bas-Bretons — are like the Welsh, 
with a half-energetic, a half-lazy expression ; early in life the 
poor womenkind lose all the softness of their fair sex. Arthur 
Young sketches a bas-Breton noble, with his large sword and 
his little miserable but nimble nag. Lamballe, he says, in 
winter is a town of the nohlesse, a little Paris. The best horses 
in France, according to Arthur Young, are the Normans for 
draught, the Limousin for the saddle ; there is a great importa- 
tion of horses from England, but that does not matter, as French 
land can be put to better account than horse-breeding. Arthur 
' I would call attention to a clever sketch of French agricultural history in 
an article in the iiVf'^ij/ryA Ilevieiv for October 1887, "Kural France," by K. E. 
Frothero. 
