the vaults, known by the ominous
names of the _Oubliettes_, or the _In Pace_, gave the mount a melancholy
notoriety.

In this short outline of the history of St. Michael's Mount, mention has
been repeatedly made of French sovereigns who have proceeded thither in
pilgrimage. The task were long to enumerate all those princes and
monarchs who distinguished it with this mark of their veneration. But
there is one other instance too important in its consequences to be
passed over in silence. Louis XI. after having expelled the rebellious
Britons from Normandy in 1463, not content with paying his devotions to
the archangel at his shrine, and bestowing upon the monks a donation of
six hundred crowns of gold, sent them the image of St. Michael, together
with the golden chain that he had himself worn upon his neck; and
directed that the three escalop shells, formerly borne upon the abbatial
shield, should be enriched by the addition of four others, and three
lilies. Nor satisfied with this, he, six years afterwards, still further
testified his devotion, by various privileges granted to the community,
and by the institution of the noble military order of St. Michael,[217]
whose collar was composed of silver escalop shells, while the medal bore
a representation of the archangel trampling upon the dragon, with the
legend, "Immensi tremor oceani."--Even in this enlightened age, the
concourse of pilgrims to the mount is by no means at an end: they are
still to be seen repairing to the church; and, if the female Druids have
ceased for many a century to sell to the sailors their enchanted arrows,
of power to still the angry ocean, when hurled into its waves by a
maiden hand, the Pythonesses of the present day find a no less plentiful
source of emolument in their chaplets, and rosaries, and crosses, and
medals, of St. Michael. The annals of the world abound in details of the
changes of form and feature which superstition has assumed in different
ages; but it is humiliating to human nature to reflect, that the
conquests obtained by philosophy over her great adversary, are in
reality very small. Superstition, like the fabled Proteus, appears under
an endless variety of forms; but she is also, like the god, still one
and the same.

The list of abbots of St. Michael's Mount, contains names of the highest
consequence in France: the Cardinal d'Estouteville, and the still more
illustrious Cardinal de Joyeuse, Henry of Lorraine, son of the Duk