Michael.
[31] The sands are so shifting and variable, that it is impossible to
cross with safety, excepting by well-known routes, and at certain times
of the tide; many lives, even of the fishermen and women, have been lost
on these sands.
[32] It a irresistible, here, not to compare in our minds, with these
twelfth-century relics of magnificence and festivity, certain emblazoned
'civic banquets,' and the gay 'halls by the sea,' with which the child
(old or young) of the nineteenth century is enraptured--the former being
the realities of a chivalrous epoch; the latter, masquerades or money
speculations, of a more advanced century. The comparison may be
considered unjust, but it is one that suggests itself again and again,
as typical of a curiously altered state of society and manners.
[33] The latest, and perhaps the most complete, description of Mont St
Michael, will be found in the 'People's Magazine' for August, 1869.
[34] French artists flock together in the valleys of the Seine and the
Somme, like English landscape painters at the junction of the Greta and
the Tees--Mortain and Vire not being yet fashionable. It is hard,
indeed, to get English artists out of a groove; to those who, like
ourselves, have had to examine the pictures at our annual Exhibitions,
year by year, somewhat closely, the streams in Wales are as familiar on
canvas, as 'Finding the Body of Harold.
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