What I Remember, Volume 2 | Page 7

of a
delightful book if only the writer were the right man.
Brittany, however, really was in those days to a great extent fresh
ground, and the strangely secluded circumstances of its population
offered much tempting material to the book-making tourist. All this is
now at an end; not so much because the country has been the subject of
sundry good books of travel, as because the people and their mode of
life, the country and its specialties have all been utterly changed by the
pleasant, convenient, indispensable, abominable railway, which in its
merciless irresistible tramp across the world crushes into a dead level of
uninteresting monotony so many varieties of character, manners, and
peculiarities. And thus "the individual withers, and the world is more
and more!" But is the world more and more in any sense that can be
admitted to be desirable, in view of the eternity of that same
Individual?
As for the Bretons, the individual has withered to that extent that he
now wears trousers instead of breeches, while his world has become
more and more assimilated to that of the Faubourg St. Antoine, with the
result of losing all those really very notable and stiff and sturdy virtues
which differentiated the Breton peasant, when I first knew him, while it
would be difficult indeed to say what it has gained. At all events the
progress which can be stated is mainly to be stated in negatives. The
Breton, as I first knew him, believed in all sorts of superstitious rubbish.
He now believes in nothing at all. He was disposed to honour and

respect God, and his priest, and his seigneur perhaps somewhat too
indiscriminately. Now he neither honours nor respects any earthly or
heavenly thing. These at least were the observations which a second, or
rather third visit to the country a few years ago suggested to me, mainly,
it is true, as regards the urban population. And without going into any
of the deeper matters which such changes suggest to one's
consideration, there can be no possible doubt as to the fact that the
country and its people are infinitely less interesting than they were.
My plans were soon made, and I hastened to lay them before Mr.
Colburn, who was at that time publishing for my mother. The trip was
my main object, and I should have been perfectly contented with terms
that paid all the expenses of it. Dî auctius fecerunt, and I came home
from my ramble with a good round sum in my pocket.
I was not greedy of money in those days, and had no unscriptural
hankerings after laying up treasure upon earth. All I wanted was a
sufficient supply for my unceasing expenditure in locomotion and inn
bills--the latter, be it observed, always on a most economical scale. I
was not a profitable customer; I took nothing "for the good of the
house." I had a Gargantuesque appetite, and needed food of some sort
in proportion to its demands. I neither took, or cared to take, any wine
with my dinner, and never wanted any description of "nightcap." As for
accommodation for the night, anything sufficed me that gave me a
clean bed and a sufficient window-opening on fresh air, under such
conditions as made it possible for me to have it open all night. To the
present day I cannot sleep to my liking in a closed chamber; and before
now, on the top of the Righi, have had my bed clothes blown off my
bed, and snow deposited where they should have been.
But quo musa tendis? I was talking about my travels in Brittany.
I do not think my book was a bad coup d'essai. I remember old John
Murray coming out to me into the front office in Albemarle Street,
where I was on some business of my mother's, with a broad
good-natured smile on his face, and putting into my hands the Times of
that morning, with a favourable notice of the book, saying as he did so,
"There, so you have waked this morning to find yourself famous!" And,

what was more to the purpose, my publisher was content with the result,
as was evidenced by his offering me similar terms for another book of
the same description--of which, more anon.
As my volumes on Brittany, published in 1840, are little likely to come
under the eye of any reader at the present day, and as the passage I am
about to quote indicates accurately enough the main point of difference
between what the traveller at that day saw and what the traveller of the
present day may see, I think I may be pardoned for giving it.
"We had observed that at Broons a style of coiffure which was new to
us