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.