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.
Three _Aves_ repeated with devotion at this odious and melancholy shrine are firmly believed to have the power to cause, within the year, the certain death of the person against whom the assistance of Our Lady of Hatred has been invoked.

And it is said that even yet occasionally, in the silence and obscurity of the evening, the figure of some assassin worshipper at this accursed shrine may be seen to glide rapidly from the solitary spot, where he has spoken the unhallowed prayer whose mystic might has doomed to death the enemy he _hates_." I must tell one other story of my Breton recollections, which refers to a time much subsequent to the publication of the book I have been quoting.