This oak was in Brittany,—­the very one, perhaps, before which,

              “So hollow, huge, and old,
  It looked a tower of ruined mason-work,
  At Merlin’s feet the wileful Vivien lay.”

Indeed, Brittany seems a kind of fairy-land to many writers.  Tennyson, Spenser, Matthew Arnold, Reade, all locate some one of their choicest scenes there.  The reason is not, perhaps, very remote.  We prate about the Anglo-Saxon blood; yet, in reality, there is very little of it to prate about, especially in the educated classes.  When the British were driven from their island, they took refuge in Wales and Brittany.  When William the Norman conquered that island again, his force was chiefly composed of the descendants of those very Britons; for so feeble was the genuine Norse element that it had been long since absorbed, and in the language of the Norman—­used until a late day upon certain records in England—­there is not one single word of Scandinavian origin.  Thus it was neither French nor Norman nor Scandinavian invading the white cliffs, but the exiled Briton reconquering his native land; and, to make the fact still stronger, the army of Richmond, Henry VII., was entirely recruited in Brittany.  Perhaps, then, the reason that Brittany is to many a region of romance and delight is a feeling akin to the pleasure we take in visiting some ancestral domain from whose soil our fathers once drew their being.

The Breton novel of Mr. Reade, “White Lies,” although somewhat crude, otherwise ranks with his best.  The action is uninterrupted and swift, the characters sharply defined, if legendary, the dialogue always sparkling, the plot cleanly executed, the whole full of humor and seasoned with wit.  So well has it caught the spirit of the scene that it reads like a translation, and, lest we should mistake the locale, everybody in the book lies abominably from beginning to end.

    “‘A lie is a lump of sin and a piece of folly,’ cries Jacintha.

    “Edouard notes it down, and then says, in allusion to a previous
    remark of hers,—­

    “‘I did not think you were five-and-twenty, though.’

    “‘I am, then,—­don’t you believe me?’

    “‘Why not?  Indeed, how could I disbelieve you after your lecture?’

    “‘It is well,’ said Jacintha, with dignity.

    “She was twenty-seven by the parish-books.”

There is a good deal of picturesque beauty in this volume, and at the opening of its affairs there occurs a paragraph which we appropriate, not merely for its merit, nor because it is the only “interior” that we can recall in all his novels, but because also it contains a characteristically fearless measuring of swords with a great champion:—­