ted but little to the moral and
intellectual progress of the country.

The Revolution seemed for this agglomeration of priests and monks
neither more nor less than a death warrant. The last of the bishops of
Treguier left one evening by a back door leading into the wood behind
his palace and fled to England. The concordat abolished the bishopric,
and the unfortunate town was not even given a sub-prefect, Lannion and
Guingamp, which are larger and busier, being selected in preference.
But large buildings, fitted up so as to fulfil only one object, nearly
always lead to the reconstitution of the object to which they were
destined. We may say morally what is not true physically: when the
hollows of a shell are very deep, these hollows have the power of
re-forming the animal moulded in them. The vast monastic edifices of
Treguier were once more peopled, and the former seminary served for
the establishment of an ecclesiastical college, very highly esteemed
throughout the province. Treguier again became in a few years' time
what St. Tudwal had made it thirteen centuries before, a town of
priests, cut off from all trade and industry, a vast monastery within
whose walls no sounds from the outer world ever penetrated, where
ordinary human pursuits were looked upon as vanity and vexation of
spirit, while those things which laymen treated as chimerical were
regarded as the only realities.

It was amid associations like these that I passed my childhood, and
it gave a bent to my character which has never been removed. The
cathedral, a masterpiece of airy lightness, a hopeless effort to
realise in granite an impossible ideal, first of all warped my
judgment. The long hours which I spent there are responsible for my
utter lack of practical knowledge. That architectural paradox made me
a man of chimeras, a disciple of St. Tudwal, St. Iltud, and St. Cadoc,
in an age when their teaching is no longer of any practical use.
When I went to the more secular town of Guingamp, where I had some
relatives of the middle class, I felt very ill at ease, and the only
pleasant companion I had there was an aged servant to whom I used
to read fairy tales. I longed to be back in the sombre old place,
overshadowed by its cathedral, but a living protest, so to speak,
against all that is mean and commonplace. I felt myself again when
I got back to the lofty steeple, the pointed nave, and the cloisters
with their fifteenth century tombs, being always at my