able than a hecatomb of enemies: the sacrifice of his profession, on conscientious grounds, is what we allude to. Major signalized himself by bravery in the Peninsular war, but a tragic incident so shocked his gentle nature, by falling under his immediate notice, (though nothing out of the common course of the "woes of war,") that, throwing up-not selling--his commission, he retired from all the pomp and circumstance of a profession he had loved, to innocence, poverty, and Wales. He became a great angler-knows almost every old oak root, and pool, and shallow brawl of every river in Wales. Long exclusive intercourse with rustic people has ingrafted much of their simplicity on the manners and feelings of our self-cashiered officer, oddly amalgamating with those of the scholar and gentleman. When his fishing campaign is likely to lead him up some river in the neighbourhood of a watering-place, his long disused regimentals are brought forth, his sword revisits his side where a lady is expected. Save and except on these occasions eliciting this" weakness of the wise," few would detect the gallant soldier in the bronzed and wandering solitary of the river banks. Too pensive and quick-spirited to encounter the gaze of well-bred impudence in the haunts of fashion, he rarely appears beyond his bounds of the wild margin of his waters. Now and then a chance throws him (like a sea production cast ashore) on some marine parade, in a crowd of the gay; and though his "arrival" is never put in print, it attracts some notice. Indeed, with his worn fishing jacket, tanned face, shapeless straw hat, huge pockets stuffed with gentles, earth-worms, maggots, with a little dirt to nourish them, remainder biscuits and cheese-scraps, forgotten relics after some three days' journey into the wilderness, his Dutch-cut trousers, marked, like posts at a ford, with lines shewing the depths of his various standings in the water in the salmon fishery, with this exterior-and a certain fish-like smell, a "villanous compound" from clothes and contents—our companion, we frankly allow, formed but a "scurvy companion" in such places, a sort of river monster. In this portable dunghill, ycleped a pocket, he always carried some classic author, sorely soiled, to read o'nights by a candle of rush pith, in any hut of clay or stone, where stress of weather or night forced him to put in till daybreak.

Whether to be ashamed or proud to confess, we hardly know, that our untitled officer consents to act as guide to any party of anglers that may chance to visit his lonely neighbourhood not far from Tregaron, Cardiganshire: to this lowly office, not only his poverty but his will (such is the social good nature of the man) consents. Nor does he ever disclose his real sphere in society, except involuntarily, by an occasional outbreak of the classic or the gentleman. And should any "brothers of the angle" visiting Wales detect, by this general sketch, our poor

Major, in some modest spoken, rather melancholic, man of forty and upwards, acting as their guide among the mountains, we entreat them to remember why he is poor, why a wanderer of Wales instead of a 66 man of blood," to remember that he is a gentleman. If he do not look like one, be the cause remembered; that it is because within, whatever his external shewing, he more resembles Him whose religion says, "Thou shalt not kill," even our Saviour, whom Decker quaintly calls, for his mild and gracious attributes, "the first true gentleman that ever lived."

2dly. A Member of the Society of Friends, disowned for marrying out of the sect, but still a Friend in all but the absurdities of that persuasion. His heart and mind were still as firmly set against war (as a crime against Christianity) as ever; but waxed very indifferent in the momentous question betwixt No and Nay; in the war of monosyllables, Yes and Yea. Moreover, his conscience was never troubled about the cut of his coat collar; nay, the colour of his whole coat was regarded (so the graver sort whispered) with the same laxity of principle. A quiet humour and good humour played about the expressive meagre face of our Quaker, as good nature did about his heart. We wish we could transfer a tithe of the little gentleman's store of those fine qualities to these pages.

3dly. A young Clergyman of Wales. He exhibits, in his mode of dress, (the round even cut of his black hair, for instance, half hiding his forehead, approximating to the costume of the Roundheads of Puritanical days, and the smoothing down of his white cravat,) also in the sanctity of his manner and tones, a rather whimsical graft of orthodoxy on Methodism. Belonging by birth to a class which almost invariably frequents the meeting-house, brought up at home, thence transferred to a Welsh college, and pretty speedily transplanted into the regular ministry, his new calling forced him into the duties of the church, that church which had been the scoff of his boyhood, and even youth, under the contemptuous nickname of the Steeple-house. A lingering hankering after the worship-place of his fathers, a penchant for the old accustomed thunder of the conventicle, as he heard it "hurled" by some godly man and shopkeeper, the Jupiter tonans of his native village, is very visible in the little good young man. Were it not for a good living he has popped into, through the intervention of the squire of his neighbourhood, who had him seated as regularly to dinner at his table as the spittoon under it after dinner, (for a somewhat similar use,) to receive the overflow of his good fellowship, the exuberance of his oratorical organs, as the other vessel of his salivary; we say, but for this good fortune, our excellent friend might at this moment be thundering away himself in the chapel, and

sneering at the parish church, as becomes the true minister of the Gospel. Even as it is, he seems to mimic in the pulpit the dear man that used to throw his mother into hysterics night and morning by his pious fury in the "preaching line;" but he having been fat, and blest with lungs equal to a forge-bellows, while our pale friend is whiffling, and his voice no more awful than a penny trumpet,-'tis but a poor imitation, after all. We shall only add, that, under the same influence, he is rather prone to look grave at the most innocent mirth, to sigh for nothing at all; he would rather get fuddled every day of the week than walk a mile on a Sunday, though but to admire the works of God in a glorious mountain landscape; and that, in his pulpit oratory, he nobly rebuts Pope's sneer about the chaplain's " never mentioning hell to ears polite," by mentioning nothing else.

4th. A certain doctor Jean Jaques, whose character we must leave to his own drawing, seeming to us to be "every thing by turns and nothing long,"-as well as his birth, parentage, and education, to his own telling,-finishes our list. Whether France gave him that Rousseauish name, or his own relatives in his earlier days -whether that ethereal land, or Wales, or England, enjoys the glory of being his birth-place, we know not, nor ever heard yet, that, like the cities claiming Homer, they ever contended for it.

Being always attached to the green quietness of lanes, in preference to the dusty barren turmoil of high roads, he applied his principle to life, and broke away from the intolerable nuisance and noise of its high turnpike road, and went burrowing about like a mole to find out a snug bye-way where he might pad upon sod, soft and cool, all the way to the grave.

"I like to come in cool and quiet to my inn," said Doctor Jaques, "and what signifies all that jostling and hurry to reach it? We shall all meet at the same old inn, the sign of the yew-tree, and the same grinning Boniface-ah, Boney-face,* indeed!—will receive us all, even my sauntering self, and those fellows whipping and spurring on, that I've left on the high road-I've no ambition to be in first at the death,' for my part." The place of his reappearance was Wales. His mode of luxuriating amidst its beauties these dialogues disclose. If his talk be found like writing, and his writing like talking-possibly this was the cause,-in solitude his pen did the part of a tongue; that is, became the instrument of effusing the fullness of thoughts. In time the inverse of this became a habit, and speech assumed the set phrases of laboured writing.

Reader! you see your company,

Who in this desert,

Under the shade of melancholy boughs,

Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time."

N. B. The doctor never puns but to himself.

Stage First.

BWLCH Y GROES.

"Thank God for a night's lodging! many a man has paid dear for a worse," said Doctor Jaques, one of our peripatetic party, as he stood with folded arms in the first light of morning, gazing at the odd shelter out of which he had just crept in his night-cap, with only his inexpressibles on; being, indeed, only a knoll of rock and a hanging thorn, which he and two small companions had roofed with green fern, and floored with dry, covering it in with a light sail-cloth, which hanging down in front served at once for a door, arras, &c. To all but the doctor his predicament would not have seemed exactly such as to warrant all the complacency with which he paused to survey (before he finished dressing) his "Folly," as it might be fitly called. The situation was high up the mountain, where the river Dovey rises, on a sort of ledge green and turfy near its craggy channel: the night mist settled in drops on his cap; the frown of night was yet visible in the vast recesses, though the fog began to grow light with the first sunshine, and the wildness of the stupendous mountainconcave that forms the pass of Bwlch y Groes, with the awful depth at which the valley and village of Llan y Mawddwy, and all that was human and home-like lay sleeping, partially disrobed of the veil of river haze, altogether formed rather a savage sort of domicile and prospect. It was a scene, however, to his fancy, and such as when fully disclosed by the drawing up of that delicate curtain, must strike the fancy of every tasteful visitant. The little-frequented road from Dinas Mawddwy to Bala, is for the few miles which conduct us to that once terrific ascent, (which takes its name of Bwlch y Groes [pass of the cross]" from a rude crucifix that was formerly to be seen on the very top in bright relief of the blue sky, placed there to remind the happy soul who had surmounted the precipice and survived, to bend in thanksgiving to God), a bowered beautiful lane along a grand pastoral valley, even yet secluded, silent, truly Welsh. The river is also Welshly, as the borderers of our land call all Welsh folks that retain their national character; that is, it is bright, hazelled, winding, rocky; the hills Alpine above, Arcadian below; the natives humble, poor, not destitute, curious, bashful, and barefoot. The doctor and his party had traversed it the day before in sunshine and in the midst of the hay harvest, and not one fall of rain had caused one fall of countenance in all the happy ones they met. children and all were in the fields, to the last "little lump" of a boy or girl. In truth, he who would enjoy a tour" to his heart," must endeavour to be in Wales during such a season. It is princely felicity, supposing a prince what he should be, loving peace, and blest in what blesses the people,―plenty.

The

The fog breaking away rapidly, set our doctor on the tiptoe of expectation for the charms of landscape soon to be revealed, already hardly hidden by the sunny remains of fog; a robe light and transparent as Roman beauties wore of old, a silvery gossamer. So there he stood, after dressing, waiting the full burst of the sun, as a spectator at a theatre awaits the entrance of the prime actor on the stage who is to give effect to the whole pageant. To himself, however, he seemed in a nobler situation. He could have fancied himself some lone navigator on a green island in a silver sea, as he bent his eye and ear toward the rolling immensity of cloud often sweeping beneath him, and to the depth where the river went sounding and swelling on, grand but invisible. This illusion was sweetly broken by the sound of girls early abroad calling the cows, the cows lowing in reply, the forms of both also viewless through the mist. A wood of a hill-top would appear, cut off from its foundation of the mountain side, a forest in air, and then an upland yellowing home-scene of a farm and its fold-yard and small meadows, the parting fog would just permit to peep,-a little pastoral picture in the sky, and quickly shut up again. But who can tell the beauty of this panorama when bluer and brighter through the kindling haze, the face of the river, and the many coloured meadows of its banks, began to shew themselves, painting its delicate transparency (evanescent as steam,) with their own hues, the hues of a summer sky, spring, grass, and flowers!

Romance (of real life too) added a mental charm to this truly Cambrian landscape. That landscape now stretching and towering quite unveiled; those grim chasms of age-worn rocks, those plunging waterfalls, those wildly hanging trees throwing their old arms across huge gullies of former water courses, the vast shadows and long-retiring dingles were many years the haunts of banditti, wild and desperate men, organised in great bodies, who levied a tax like the Scottish black mail, on the richer inhabitants as a reward for immunity from that system of noon-day plunder which the poorer suffered from them, seeing their cattle driven off to their retreats, without the means of recovery; the higher country being at that date (the sixteenth century) almost all one black forest. These robbers, called "Gwylliad Cochion Mawddwy (red haired robbers of Dinasmouthy), also the robbers of the black wood," (a melo-dramatic title,) frequently took prisoners and demanded ransom for them; descended chimneys by night, compelling the terrified country people to be always at watch and ward; to place scythes across their chimneys, against these domestic invaders; in short, enacted all and singular the feats and

*

We are told that remains of scythes have been found not very long since in such situations.