sounding to Saxon ears like Tankard, or Crucible,
or Sick-Dahlia, or other such distinctive and
characteristic nouns, who still offer prizes to the best
harpers, and would willingly take not the wall
(but the law) of other great ladies, who have rival
minstrels in fee and favour whom they would
enjoy to see invested with badge and medal. There
are still painstaking schoolmasters and tranquil
curates, all immense improvements on the last
generation, whose time hangs heavily on their
hands during the winter, and who innocently set
themselves to express and to display that learning
is better than ignorance,— that loyalty does
not mean rebellion, and that from the time of
Caradoc and Llywarch Hen downwards, the
men of Wales have taken the lead in arms and
arts,—in theology, science, and poetry.—I think—
considering the predominance of the tone of
Fuelen in essays as well as addresses to be
heard—Shakespeare, who has been proved to be
everything to all men, must some day have been
demonstrated to have been Welsh by birth.

The Bards, Ovates, and untitled public, are
positive cormorants, in the quantity of addresses
they will swallow—and ostriches in the tough
and dry fare they will digest, English and Welsh.
And they particularly delight in the popular
oratory addressed to prejudice—by the pleasant
local man, who knows this squire by sight, and
calls the other harper by some other title added to
Tankard, which proves mighty consolatory to the
harpist a speaker proved to be a Bard, no doubt,
by the figures of his admiring speech, as, for
instance, when eulogising the concerts, he delights
in "the gradations, the people, the gaslight, and
the general brilliancy of the assembly"—a Bard
confessed by his meteoric hair, which, however,
does not stream after the fashion of Gray's
Bard, but falls regularly back from his forehead
in the new fashion of genius brought in
by Dr. Liszt.—We fancy that this speaker can
only have felt the pulse of the illiterate among
his congregation, when he declares that, having
tolerated England as a country of which Wales
is the nucleus, he is not to be expected to
care a whit for any country or continent over
the sea—on the contrary, that if the dwellers
in such small tracts of land cut one another's
throats like the Kilkenny cats (why not the cats
of Caerphilly?), it is all one to him so far as
his great patriotic and philanthropic heart can
care.—But they enjoy most the funny Cambrian
speechifier (suppose we call him Foneddigion a
Boneddigesau), great in winks to his audience,
greater still in the flapping of his wings, and in
personalities which may hit or miss.— I hope all
do not habitually scream in a treble voice as
loudly as did the Swansea one, who in his black
suit and clerical cravat, and in the gesticulating
vehemence of his outcries, reminded me of a
Methodist revivalist under whom I suffered at a
field-preaching many a year ago, being pointed
out by the earnest man as the sinful Dives, who
was to be held up as a terror and warning to his
congregation. They enjoy, in short, any and
every variety of the washed-out talker—quite as
fresh, quite as glib, quite as long-winded, as the
same specimens, which, alas! (though Saxons,
let us be honest) may be found in our chambers
of legislature, or at any worshipful public dinner
in the county of Middlesex.

But there was more than all this at the
Swansea meeting, otherwise I should not have
harped on it, with all its sense and nonsense, as
a curious characteristic festival. Missing the
first morning, I heard, to return to the speeches,
on the third an excellent practical address by the
Mayor of Swansea—and on the fourth a discourse
by the Bishop of St. David's, which was
admirable in justice, in illustration, and in counsel,
and thus I fear was but in seeming relished by
some of the small local people, who are nothing
when not blowing up the fire of their own and
their admirers' narrow vanity.— It was droll to
see the historian of Greece laid hold of on the spot
and made a Druid of almost ere he had sat down.

Throughout the week it was obvious that
every one's heart was in it.— A flaming advertisement
of a Circus promised, among other intellectual
and anti-bardic temptations, that a celebrated
pugilist should display his testimonials,
including a goblet, value five hundred pounds,
presented to him by a patron of manly sports
(engine-driving among them), of whom England
has heard enough and to spare—and that two
female Blondins should perform the "sensation
feat" of going round a ring of rope fifty feet
from the ground, on the outside of the faery
tent, and, on their meeting, that the one should
vault over the other;—but I am happy to say
that I have not heard one whisper among the
humblest of the audiences of six thousand people
by which it could be gathered that one single man
had seen the goblet of glorious origin or that
one single woman had been terrified into screams
and fainting-fits by the magnificent show of
female grace and intrepidity.—(Perhaps the
drenching rain threw cold water on the latter
part of the show!)—On the other hand, the best
shops in Merthyr Tydvil were one day closed by
common consent, in order to give the people a
chance of enjoying either this bardic contest or
a great rifle display at Dowlais—or the opening
of Nanndu Church.— Everywhere the people
were talking of essays and prizes and choirs and
tunes—some of writing letters to the papers,
while holding forth under inn portico or railway
bridge, to protest against injustice in award of
the prizes, or to tell how some genius, to whose
bardic title I cannot approach nearer than
Kettle-in-a-Dell, had basely flaunted, like the
jackdaw, in plumes which literally belonged to
Tally-ar-hyd-y-nos—meaning the speaker.—I am afraid
it runs in the blood of the Bards to enjoy playing
"a hand of litigation" now and then.

It is time, however, to take a look at the
Pavilion where the solemnities took pjace.

On the outside, the Pavilion looked ragged
and miserable enough, built on a rough piece of
ground hard by the docks, which the myriad
tramping feet under a storm of rain easily
converted into mud. It was not hard to believe that
the temporary building of deals had been hired
cheap: less easy to conceive it large enough