half-measures, an idealist unsuccessfully attempting to pass muster for a Philistine, a tissue of contradictions, resembling the double-natured hircocerf of scholasticism.  One of my two halves must have been busy demolishing the other half, like the fabled beast of Ctesias which unwittingly devoured its own paws.  As was well said by that keen observer, Challemel-Lacour:  “He thinks like a man, feels like a woman, and acts like a child.”  I have no reason to complain of such being the case, as this moral constitution has procured for me the keenest intellectual joys which man can taste.

My race, my family, my native place, and the peculiar circle in which I was brought up, by diverting me from all material pursuits, and by rendering me unfit for anything except the treatment of things of the mind, had made of me an idealist, shut out from everything else.  The application of my intellect might have been a different one, but the principle would have remained the same.  The true sign of a vocation is the impossibility of getting away from it:  that is to say, of succeeding in anything except that for which one was created.  The man who has a vocation mechanically sacrifices everything to his dominant task.  External circumstances might, as so often happens, have checked the cause of my life and prevented me from following my natural bent, but my utter incapability of succeeding in anything else would have been the protest of baffled duty, and Predestination would in one way have been triumphant by proving the subject of the experiment to be powerless outside the kind of labour for which she had selected him.  I should have succeeded in any variety of intellectual application; I should have failed miserably in any calling which involved the pursuit of material interests.

The characteristic feature of all degrees of the Breton race is its idealism—­the endeavour to attain a moral and intellectual aim, which is often erroneous but always disinterested.  There never was a race of men less suited for industry and trade.  They can be got to do anything by putting them upon their honour; but material gain is deemed unworthy of a man of spirit, the noblest occupations being those which bring no profit, as of the soldier, the sailor, the priest, the true gentleman who derives from his land no more than the amount sanctioned by long tradition, the magistrate and the thinker.  These ideas are based upon the theory, an incorrect one perhaps, that wealth is only to be acquired by taking advantage of others, and grinding down the poor.  The outcome of these views is that the man of wealth is not thought nearly so much of as he who devotes himself to the public welfare, or who represents the views of the district.  The people have no patience with the idea, very prevalent among self-made men, that their accumulation of wealth confers a benefit upon the community.  When in former times they were told that “the king sets great value upon the Bretons,” they