with fountains and running streams, we do [ of Jauioz' is a conspicuous instance. The not find that they people their inland wa- Baron himself is an historical character. ters with any other description of poetical He flourished in the 14th century, particispirits. There are no naiads or dryads in pated in most of the public events of that Brittany. But they seem to have transport-period in France, and served in the Holy ed into the interior some of their salt-wa- Land. The ballad relates to circumstances ter phantasies, and to give an honorable re- which occurred during his stay in Brittany, ception to syrens and mermaids in their where it is said, he bought a young country lakes and ponds. One of the most remark-girl for gold from her family, and carried able instances is that of a syren who is said her off to France, where she died 'of grief. to inhabit the pond of a duke near Vannes, The ballad opens with the young girl sitwhich is so close to the sea that she may en- ting by the river side, when the death-bird joy, whenever she pleases, the sight of those (a Breton superstition) tells her that she is terrible calamities which were said, of old, sold to the Baron of Jauioz. She comes to have been so grateful to her sisterhood. home and asks her mother, is it true? This beautiful nymph comes out of a mor- Her mother refers her to her father—he dening to take the air, and spread her green sires her to ask her brother, who avows at tresses in the sun. According to the tra- once that they have sold her, that the mondition, a soldier surprised her once on the ey is received, and that she must go instantsummit of a hill, and was so charmed by ly. She asks her mother what dress she her aspect, that he could not resist the shall wear; but her mother tells her it is temptation of approaching her, when she of no consequence; a black horse waits at seized him in her wiry arms, and plunged the door to convey her. As she goes she with him to the bottom of the water. If hears the bells of her village, and weeps you ask for the story of this syren, they and bids them adieu! Passing a lake she will tell you that she was formerly a prin- sees small boats filled with crowds of the cess to whom these waters belonged; and dead in winding sheets. She is overthat she refused to marry a noble suitor, whelmed with grief and terror, and nearly the owner of the Lake of Plaisance. One loses her reason. At last she reaches the day, fatigued by his entreaties, she hastily château. said to him, believing the thing to be impossible,that she would become his wife when the waters of the Lake of Plaisance should join those of her own domain. Her lover took her at her word, and constructed a canal, by which the miracle was accomplished. Having finished his work, he invited her to a grand fete at his chateau, and, to crown his triumph, conveyed her in a barge with great pomp along the canal, demanding the fulfilment of her promise at the end of the journey. The princess was in despair; and, seeing no escape from a marriage she loathed, being all the while secretly attached to another, she threw herself head-foremost into the lake-an effectual recipe for the manufacture of syrens, Of course she was never seen again; but from that day to the present, the lake has been haunted by a syren, believed to be the said princess, who takes particular pleasure in making her appearance on the rocks in the fine summer mornings, deliberately combing out her long hair, and weaving coronals of water-lilies. Whenever any of these ballads touch upon the domestic affections, they exhibit considerable delicacy of treatment and truthfulness of feeling. The ballad of The Baron That fearful lord-his beard is black His hair is blanch'd-a wild flash flies I've long desired! Come, sweet, and see "My wealth; come, range my chambers o'er, And count my gold and silver store. "I'd rather to my mother forth! To count her faggots by the hearth." "Then, let us, for a bliss divine. Retire to taste my costly wine." "I'd drink my father's ditch stream first, Where even his horses slake their thirst." "Well, come with me and search the town, To buy a handsome fête-day gown." "I'd rather have a petticoat Of stuff by my dear mother wrought." Finding her inconsolable, the noble lord begins to repent his bargain. But it is too late. Her heart is broken. The rest of the ballad is very melancholy. "Ye birds, that on the wing rejoice, "To all my friends at your next meeting, "To all I love-adieu-adieu- Two-three months had pass'd away; The family in slumber lay'Twas in the midnight, still and deep, The family were sunk in sleepNo sound the solemn silence broke, When at the door a low voice spoke"Oh! father, mother-pray for meFor God's sweet love-pray fervently! "Get mourning, too, my parents dear, For your poor child is on her bier!" This ballad is one of the most affecting in the collection. It is also strongly colored with national feelings. A striking and highly appropriate effect is produced, as the poor young girl goes away from her home, by the sound of the parish bells, calling up so many cherished associations, so many happy domestic memories. In Brittany, where the bells of the churches are drawn into all the ceremonies of life and death, the pathos of this little passage touches the universal heart. Amongst other subjects treated by the Breton poets, in common with the popular writers of nearly every literature in Europe, is that which is best known to the majority of readers by the 'Leonore' of Bürger. There is a Danish version, a Welsh version, and even a modern Greek version of this famous story. The Breton poem is not destitute of a poetical energy, and breadth of style worthy of so striking a theme. It is called 'The Foster-Brother.' bat, will come back for her in three weeks and three days. She runs home, looks at the ring, and finds that it is the same which her foster-brother wears on his right hand. In the interval, her step-mother resolves that she shall marry a stable-boy. This relentless determination is carried into effect; but on the night of the wedding, the bride disappears, and nobody knows where she is gone. The manor-house in darkness lay; its inmates soundly slept; But at the farm the poor young girl her lonely vigil kept. "Who's there?" "Tis I, thy foster-brother, Nola." "Can it be? It is it is my brother dear-Ah! welcome sight to me!" Thy hand's like ice!-thy hand and heart !—dear brother, art thou ill!" very near dear!" Gwennolaik, the heroine of this ballad, is an orphan. Her father, mother, and her two sisters, are all dead. She lives in the "Cling closely to me, sister mine! the house is manor-house with her step-mother, who ill-You hear our bridal songs already-listen, sister treats her, and puts her to drudgery. She has only one friend in the world, her fosterbrother; but he has been at sea for six Unlike the hero of the German and Greek years. She is constantly watching for his ballads, our lover conducts his mistress to return. One dark night she is sent to a charming isle, filled with crowds of happy draw water at a fairy well, when a voice souls dancing merrily, and singing for joy, asks her, 'Is she betrothed?' She answers where she finds her mother and two sisters, 'No;' and receives a bridal ring, and a and where the nuptials, we are led to infer, pledge that a chevalier returning from take place under the most auspicious cirNantes, where he was wounded in a com- cumstances. This delightful spot is no *This is very characteristic in the French version: Faites mes compliments à tous mes compatriotes quand vous les verres! other than the Elysium of the Druids, which, according to the Welsh tradition, is the Isle of Avalon, now called Glaston Heave as with sudden tempests, and the earth roll fearfully. bury, a large orchard of apple-trees completely surrounded by running streams. The belief in this old tradition still holds good in Brittany; and, as it is a part of the articles of faith that no soul can obtain admission until the funeral honors have been duly performed, the Bretons exhibit an exemplary rigor in discharging all offices of that nature. Their funeral rites are precisely the same now as they were in the earliest times. "I know all things that through all time, in all the world were known, All things that ever happen'd yet, or ever shall be done.' She then goes on to recite some of her means of sorcery; as how she has three which is destined to desolate the earth, and vipers sitting on the egg of a dragon, how she nourishes her vipers, not with the flesh of partridges or woodcocks, but with the sacred blood of innocents. Having such tremendous resources at her com with me, If we remain upon the earth, one year, or two, or three "Yet two or three, my Light and I, ere they have swiftly flown, The story of Heloïse and Abelard forms a favorite subject in the popular poetry of Brittany. For many years those lovers, so famous in the rhymes of all countries, mand, she threatens to overturn the world lived at the village of Pallet, near Nantes: at last-if she only live long enough. and they soon acquired in their own neigh-"If I remain upon the earth, and my sweet clerk borhood such a reputation for wisdom and knowledge, that it is nothing very surprising to find them, in that credulous and exaggerating age, converted by popular wonder into something over and above the average of humanity. But the English reader will scarcely be prepared to find them transformed into a pair of sorcerers. Yet such is the actual substance of the popular ballad in which Heloïse, speaking in her own person, celebrates her love and her learning. There is a curious mixture of the ridiculous and the profane in this ballad, from which we give the opening verses, following the original nearly word for word. My Abelard and I shall make the earth turn upside down." The poet finding his imgination running a little too far, and apparently afraid of the consequences, steps in at this critical point, and winds up the song with a sort of religious moral Take care, oh! Heloise, and think upon your soul's abode; For if this world belongs to you, the next be longs to God!" There are several songs in the collection to which we would gladly direct attention, either for their traditional and historical interest or their poetical beauty. Amongst these may be mentioned the celebrated ballad of 'Geneviève of Rustéfan,' 'Our Lady of Fulgoat,' The Heiress of Kéroulaz,' the Elegy on Monsieur de Névet,' 'LezBriez,' the historical song of [the Bretons, 'The Exiled Priest,' several of the short tender love songs, and some songs of the feasts, festivals, and seasons. But we have already extended our notice of these lyrics to as great a length as we can reasonably spare; and the reader will probably be sufficiently enabled to estimate their general characteristics from the specimens we have laid before him. There is another subject of great interest connected with the literature of Brittany, and still less known beyond the frontiers of the country-the drama of the Bretons. Upon the most curious of their kind and form this strange class of productions-certainly now existing in any part of Europe-we may take another opportunity of offering an extended notice. CEMETERIES AND CHURCHYARDS. From the Quarterly Review. 1. A Supplementary Report on the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns, made at the request of Her Majesty's principal Secretary of State for the Home Department. By Edwin Chadwick, Esq., Barrister-atLaw. London. 1843. 2. On the Laying out, Planting, and Man- 3. Gatherings from Graveyards, particu- 1843. the struggle no less of the natural than of the spiritual man; and one people, by the art of embalmment, has endeavored to escape the corruption which others have prevented by fire. While the piety of natural religion has made man's last want his greatest, and looked upon the violator of the dead as the worst enemy of the living, a yet earlier tradition has inspired him to escape the curse of the worm, and the return to the dust from whence he sprung. To the latter bear witness the cinerary urns of Greece and Rome, the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the decorated chamber-tombs of Etruria, perhaps also the gilded skulls and locomotive corpses of the Scythians; while Priam, Polydorus, Antigone, and Archytas exemplify the honor of the rites of burial; and the tabooed plots of New Zealand, and the cairns of the Esquimaux, are the extreme links of the chain of eternal and universal piety which hallows the sepulchres of our Fathers. The dogs and birds,' so often denounced or averted as a curse by heathen poets, are scarcely less earnestly decried by the Psalmist; and to be buried like a king's daughter,' may be said to have Passed into an Hebrew proverb. Hardly any but an unbeliever in revelation would order his body to be burned; but it must be a Giaour to nature who could exclaim, What recks it, though his corse may lie The bird that tears that prostrate form SPLENDID in ashes and pompous in the * Man has sometimes built himself grave, an argument of immortality from the grandeur of his tomb; and the desire to preserve a festering body and a fading name from utter decay, has been drawn into a natural The history of Revealed Religion exhibevidence of the incorruption of the soul.its to us a middle and a better way; neiBut a splendid monument speaks as much ther indifferent nor over-scrupulous as to of the dread of annihilation as of the hope the fate of the mortal body, avoiding at of a resurrection; and the love of posthu- once the outcasting to the beasts of the mous fame, whether in pyramids or in the field, and the expensive carefulness of the mouths of men, is at best but a proof of the funeral pyre. The rite of interment, in its 'longing after' an immortality of which it literal sense of consigning a body to the gives no sign. The worm below mocks at ground, is indeed a singular recognition of the masonry above; the foundation of our the ancient curse, 'Dust thou art, and unto monuments, as of our houses, is in the dust; dust shalt thou return; for though other and the nameless pyramid, and the broken nations have, for a while and in a degree, urn, and the 'mummy become merchan-used this custom, the unbroken tradition of dize,' are as true a page in the history of the the Jewish people alone observed it in its 'noble animal,' as his grandest efforts of completeness and simplicity. The cave of mind or hand after a diuturnity of mem- Macpelah was purchased as a buryingory.' place by the Father of the Faithful; and To baffle the powers of Death has been * 'Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature.'Sir T. Browne's Urn-burial, ch. v. AUGUST, 1844. 29 It is curious that this very expression, as applied to the vulture, should have been condemned by Longinus in the Sophist Gorgias, 1500 years Γύπες ἔμψυχοι τάφοι. before Byron wrote it. Long., ii. 2. It is not probable that the noble poet had seen the passage of either rhetorician. close by his side the bones of Joseph, after galling to the heathen and apostate empebeing borne by the children of Israel in rors, than the undesponding psalmody of their wanderings in the wilderness, rested their funeral processions and their devout in peace; and it seems no fortuitous em- thanksgiving at the tomb. St. Chrysostom blem of God's people, as strangers and pil- is justly loud against the remnants of heagrims upon earth, that their first possession thenism in the hired mourners who were in the land of promise should be a tomb. sometimes obtruded; while St. Cyprian The case of Jonathan and Saul-and there seems to have been over-earnest in his conare a few others recorded in Holy Writ- demnation of sorrow and all its signs; for whose bones were burned-was a clear ex- though our Lord rebuked the women of Jeception to their general usage, and even in rusalem who wept for Him, He himself this case the ashes were afterwards inhum- wept at the grave of Lazarus; and the deed. But while the children of the Promise vout men who carried Stephen to his burial, preserved inviolate the ancient rite of inter- made great lamentation over him. The ment, and eschewed pompous monuments Puritans, false, with all their professions, and vain epitaphs, their yet indistinct per- to every touch of nature, condemned, as ception of a resurrection, the dawn only of did St. Cyprian, all mourning garments; a brighter day, was not allowed to pene- what would they now say to the ostentatious trate the veil which hung over the grave, weepers and flaunting hatbands which so though even that was a pillar of light to pharisaically distinguish, in the north espethem compared to the cloud and darkness cially, their modern representatives? On which it was to the Gentiles. Ere the the delicate and often perplexing subject of stone was rolled away from the sepulchre, the degree and temper of mourning for the death had still its defilement, and mourning dead, let these words of Jeremy Taylor its sackcloth and ashes. suffice: But when our Lord by His own dying 'Solemn and appointed mournings are good had taken away the pollution, as by His expressions of our dearness to the departed rising again He had taken away the sting soul, and of his worth, and our value of him; of death; when life and immortality were and it hath its praise in nature, and in manners, brought to light, and the doctrine of the and in public customs; but the praise of it is Resurrection of the Body had established, not in the Gospel, that is, it hath no direct and once and for ever, all touching the mystery proper uses in religion. For if the dead did of the grave and of the life hereafter which die in the Lord. then there is joy to him; and it is an ill expression of our affection and our man shall be permitted here to know, the doubt and uncertainty which harrassed men's that hath carried our friend to a state of high charity, to weep uncomfortably at a change minds on the relations of life and death, and felicity. Something is to be given to custom, the things thereto pertaining, were ended, something to fame, to nature, and to civilities, and to the single eye of faith the prospect, and to the honor of the deceased friend; for near and distant, was clear and plain. that man is esteemed miserable for whom no That body which He had taken upon Him-friend or relative sheds a tear or pays a solemn self, and declared to be the temple of the sigh. So far is piety; beyond, it may be the ostentation and bragging of grief, or a design Holy Ghost, which was to rise again in to serve worse ends. I desire to die a dry more glorious form, could never be relin- death, but am not very desirous to have a dry quished to the beasts of the field; while funeral; some flowers sprinkled on my grave that anointing which He took for His burial, would be well and comely-and a soft shower, and that sepulchre which He hanselled, to turn those flowers into a springing memory purified the dead body, recognized ceremoor a fair rehearsal, that I may not go forth of nies, and consecrated the tomb. The tear-my doors as my servants carry the entrails of beasts.-Holy Dying. ing of hair and rending of garments was modified into a sorrow not without hope; and as, under the Promise, the first plot of ground was a sepulchre-so, under its fulfilment, the first sepulchre was in a garden; as if to show that it was no longer the land of the dead, but of the living; and that death was shorn of half its terrors. That men could in any sense rejoice over the grave, was not the least of the miracles of the early Christians; and nothing was more While the general revelation of immortality has thus put light in the place of darkness and joy for mourning, the particular Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body in like manner suggests a decency and comeliness in the funeral solemnities. This is no place for theological disquisition, but it should be rememberedwhat is too much forgotten-that the resurrection of the body is no mere abstruse, |