390 Suggestive Recreation. of the Bretons. You will return not only refreshed by the bodily recreation, but ready to appreciate still better the state of civilisation which Britons have reached. MONT ST. MICHEL. INE drawback to the interest with which you visit many celebrated spots is the difficulty of identifying them when they are small, or of taking them in at a glance when they are extensive. "Tradition," says the guide-book, "assigns the exploits of to this locality." There is the hitch. Whereabouts did the gulf open in the forum? Here is the forum, but where was the cleft? Did the patriotic Roman who rode into it, look east or west, when he put spurs to his horse for the leap? Descend into the Mamertine prison; tradition says that St. Paul was confined there. He was a prisoner somewhere in Rome, and that is all -tradition does the rest. It has a ragged edge, has tradition. It has led to mistakes in everything. It has perverted histories and religions without end; it has lured and hoodwinked the keenest antiquaries. But it is so probable, so attractive, however uncertain, that 392 "The Cleft was Here." it saves as much trouble as it gives. Since the majority of mankind prefer a respectable tradition, received without pains, to a fact which needs to be established by labour, learning, and patience, we need not wonder at traditions generally carrying the day. "The cleft was here," says the cicerone, drawing a line on the ground with his stick. Give me a fearless, uncompromising, positive cicerone. But a conscientious guide, who scratches his head and thinks! what can be more provoking? I fell into this train of thought this morning, while I sat upon the rampart of Avranches, and looked down upon the singular rock of St. Michel, standing up as clear as a ship out of a sea of quicksand-standing up there more than 500 feet high, looking round upon the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, as much as to say: "Ah! you have a history, no doubt, but your accounts are all in a muddle. I am like the dot of an i above an obliterated line. There is no mistake about me; I have preserved my pedigree distinct; I am where I have always been, though I may not be what I was." The rock of St. Michel, famous in the border history of England and France, is a many-pointed granite pile, about three thou Historical Distinctness. 393 sand feet in circumference, and five hundred and eighty feet high, rising abruptly in an immense expanse of sea and flat sand in the bay of Avranches) like a solitary cruet-stand in the middle of a large round dining-room table. There it is. No tradition ever helped to identify its position. How irregularly fortune has scattered her marks over the world! Here is one district which no book of history can pass without allusion; there is another which no historian has ever troubled himself to refer to. This mountain is a calendar of events; that has offered itself to the notice of a thousand generations, unmarked, disregarded. Perhaps there never was a spot round which, considering its littleness and seclusion, more local history has gathered than round this Mont St. Michel. Like the small point of an electrical machine, about which the stream of magic fluid buzzes, while the rest, though charged, is still, so this granite peak drew the streams of war and peace from a wide circle for two long thousand years as a sanctuary and centre of the Druids; as a temple of Jupiter, and Roman military station; as a convent, towards which long lines of pilgrims converged from afar; as a fortress which never was taken-never, till the Revolution whirlwind spun over Brittany, and turned St. Michel, for the first time, inside out. What visions of the past came floating up as I sat and dreamed on the rampart of Avranches, on that still summer day! The straight dusty road towards Granville lay like a white ribbon across the green country. Peasants cut the wheat and barley in the little fields beneath ; a parcel of small children in sabots were playing in the shade, at the catholic game of dirt pies, in French; one or two sails notched the horizon far beyond the bay in which St. Michel's rock had stood for ages past compute. The very shape and character of the coast had changed. The rock was once surrounded by wood-people have dug up the trunks of trees-though modern history has known it only as the rock amid the quicksands. Its position makes it, or rather made it, impregnable; for a Whitworth gun would now sit up on the shore of the mainland, and pitch solid shot and shell into it, like a butt. It is neither on the land nor in the water; twice a day the tide surrounds it. Boats, of old, could approach it only at certain times. They could not blockade it; but coming near enough to be injured, would be obliged to retire at once, |