But I have an older authority for the practice in
question, which Sir Francis is hardly likely to have lighted on.
That learned antiquary and portentously voluminous writer, Francesco
Cancellieri, who was well known to the Roman world in the latter years
of the last, and the earliest years of the present, century, used
to compose his innumerable works upon a similar principle. And when
attacked by the critics his cotemporaries, who Italian-like supposed
academically correct form to be the most important thing in any
literary work, he defended himself on the same ground. "If I don't
catch it _now_, I may probably forget it; and is the world to be
deprived of the information it is in my power to give it, for the sake
of the formal correctness of my work?"
There is another passage in my book on Brittany respecting which it
would be interesting to know whether recent travellers can report
that the state of things there described no longer exists. I wrote in
1839--
"Very near Treguier, on a spot appropriately selected for such a
worship--the barren top of a bleak unsheltered eminence--stands the
chapel of _Notre Dame de la Haine!_ Our Lady of HATRED! The most
fiendish of human passions is supposed to be under the protection of
Christ's religion! What is this but a fragment of pure and unmixed
Paganism, unchanged except in the appellation of its idol, which has
remained among these lineal descendants of the Armorican Druids for
more than a thousand years after Christianity has become the professed
religion of the country! Altars, professedly Christian, were raised
under the protection of the Protean Virgin, to the demon _Hatred_; and
have continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from
blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven's patronage and assistance
for thoughts and wishes which they would be ashamed to breathe to man.
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