id="pgepubid00017">I.

CANNES AND ST. HONORAT.

In a colloquial sort of way we talk glibly enough of leaving England, but England is by no means an easy country to leave. If it bids us farewell from the cliffs of Dover, it greets us again on the quay of Calais. It would be a curious morning's amusement to take a map of Europe, and mark with a dot of red the settlements of our lesser English colonies. A thousand Englands would crop up along the shores of the Channel or in quiet nooks of Normandy, around mouldering Breton castles or along the banks of the Loire, under the shadow of the Maritime Alps or the Pyrenees, beneath the white walls of Tunis or the Pyramids of the Nile. During the summer indeed England is everywhere—fishing in the fiords of Norway, sketching on the Kremlin, shooting brigands in Albania, yachting among the Cyclades, lion-hunting in the Atlas, crowding every steamer on the Rhine, annexing Switzerland, lounging through Italian galleries, idling in the gondolas of Venice. But even winter is far from driving England home again; what it really does is to concentrate it in a hundred little Britains along the sunny shores of the South. Each winter resort brings home to us the power of the British doctor. It is he who rears pleasant towns at the foot of the Pyrenees, and lines the sunny coasts of the Riviera with villas that gleam white among the olive groves. It is his finger that stirs the camels of Algeria, the donkeys of Palestine, the Nile boats of Egypt. At the first frosts of November the doctor marshals his wild geese for their winter flitting, and the long train streams off, grumbling but obedient, to the little Britains of the South.

Of these little Britains none is more lovely than Cannes. The place is a pure creation of the health-seekers whose gay villas are thrown fancifully about among its sombre fir-woods, though the "Old Town," as it is called nowadays, remains clinging to its original height, street above street leading up to a big bare church of the Renascence period, to fragments of mediæval walls and a great tower which crowns the summit of the hill. At the feet of this height lie the two isles of Lerins, set in the blue waters of the bay; on the east the eye ranges over the porphyry hills of Napoul to the huge masses of the Estrelles; landwards a tumbled country with bright villas dotted over it rises gently to the Alps. As a strictly winter resort Cannes is far too exposed for the more delicate class of invalids; as a spring resort it is without a rival. Nowhere is the air so bright and elastic, the light so wonderfully brilliant and diffused. The very soil, full of micaceous fragments, sparkles at our feet. Colour takes a depth as well as a refinement strange even to the Riviera; nowhere is the sea so darkly purple, nowhere are the tones of the distant hills so delicate and evanescent, nowhere are the sunsets so sublime. The scenery around harmonizes in its gaiety, its vivacity, its charm with this brightness of air and light. There is little of grandeur about it, little to compare in magnificence with the huge background of the cliffs behind Mentone or the mountain wall which rises so steeply from its lemon groves. But everywhere there is what Mentone lacks—variety, largeness, picturesqueness of contrast and surprise. Above us is the same unchanging blue as there, but here it overarches gardens fresh with verdure and bright with flowers, and houses gleaming white among the dark fir-clumps; hidden little ravines break the endless tossings of the ground; in the distance white roads rush straight to grey towns hanging strangely against the hill-sides; a thin snow-line glitters along the ridge of the Maritime Alps; dark purple shadows veil the recesses of the Estrelles.

Nor is it only this air of cheerfulness and vivacity which makes Cannes so pleasant a spring resort for invalids; it possesses in addition an advantage of situation which its more sheltered rivals necessarily want. The high mountain walls that give their complete security from cold winds to Mentone or San Remo are simply prison walls to visitors who are too weak to face a steep ascent on foot or even on donkey-back, for drives are out of the question except along one or two monotonous roads. But the country round Cannes is full of easy walks and drives, and it is as varied and beautiful as it is accessible. You step out of your hotel into the midst of wild scenery, rough hills of broken granite screened with firs, or paths winding through a wilderness of white heath. Everywhere in spring the ground is carpeted with a profusion of wild-flowers, cistus and brown orchis, narcissus and the scarlet anemone; sometimes the forest scenery sweeps away, and leaves us among olive-grounds and orange-gardens arranged in formal, picturesque rows. And from every little height there are the same distant views of far-off mountains, or the old town flooded with yellow light, or islands lying gem-like in the dark blue sea, or the fiery hue of sunset over the Estrelles.

Nor are these land-trips the only charm of Cannes. No one has seen the coast of Provence in its beauty who has not seen it from the sea. A sail to the isles of Lerins reveals for the first time the full glory of Cannes even to those who have enjoyed most keenly the large picturesqueness of its landscapes, the delicate colouring of its distant hills, the splendour of its sunsets. As one drifts away from the shore the circle of the Maritime Alps rises like the framework of some perfect picture, the broken outline of the mountains to the left contrasting with the cloud-capt heights above Turbia, snow-peaks peeping over the further slopes between them, delicate lights and shadows falling among the broken country of the foreground, Cannes itself stretching its bright line of white along the shore. In the midst of the bay, the centre as it were of this exquisite landscape, lie the two isles of Lerins. With the larger, that of St. Marguerite, romance has more to do than history, and the story of the "Man in the Iron Mask," who was so long a prisoner in its fortress, is fast losing the mystery which made it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St. Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism of Egypt first penetrated into the West.

The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Cœnobites of the Nile had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious concurrence of events the cœnobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars, transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of St.