villanies attributed to Italian bandits, with doubtless as many romantic episodes as adorn less veritable robber-stories.

Their extermination too, attended with a wild and terrible burst of maternal passion, and a consequent memorable murder, that of a judge, formed a catastrophe in unison with all the aptitude for romance which an "Author of Waverly" could have wished ready made to his hand. Such was the land, and its associations, and its present magnificence, which now lay, in all the beauty of morning, and glory of a July one, beneath the feet and the eye of Doctor Jaques.

"Wales! the beautiful! the grand!" he began to murmur in an ecstacy. Wales! that I saw, I trod, so long while yet a boy and while your green mountains were yet unseen and untrod; saw and wandered over in an eternal dream of longing, visible in a wild horizon of my own fancy's formation, "tecum vivere amem!" Dream of my life! soother of its decline-" tecum obeam libens!" Good God! that such a country should have less attraction for Southron readers than Ireland's bogs, and boozing gentlemen, or Scotland's heathery wastes! About those, what writers! what readers! while Wales, this land of romance, and ruins, and mountains!-Wales, with its "old graves" and green battlefields full of human bones, shutting in many an untold tragedy! -Wales, the land of martyrs, sleeps over their relics, and none draws from out of deep oblivion those who greatly dared or nobly fell in her defence; her sheep wander over them, her harvests wave; sunk into a pastoral province from a kingdom, she lies "mute inglorious, she had no poet, and is dead." (Our Doctor was a sort of whimsical Improvisatrice when alone.) Whatever moved him (and he was one of the genus irritable,) found vent in a sort of rapturous prose, which, as a little liable to be mistaken for bombast, he was anxiously careful to not have overheard. This must account for this flighty soliloquy, which by no means prove, the Doctor non compos, worthiest reader.)

"I have stood," he continued, on her Hên Feddau,* (Old Graves), by her Fynnon Waedog (the Bloody Well); have mused at midnight in the green weedy depth of the Pant y Gwae (the Hollow of Woe); heard the yellow autumn leaves eddying round the Maen Achwynfau (the Stone of Lamentation and Weeping). What names are these! What tragic mystery in the words, thus half recording dark stories of the past, like ancient characters almost obliterated on some ruinous tomb! How they excite, yet disappoint, solemn curiosity! They are awful hieroglyphics of human, of national suffering, which human sympathy loves to study and interpret.

Then what sublimity of still nature! What pastoral paradises

Names of places in Wales.

ear,

are this country's vallies! What a luxury for eye,a , and and soul, her rivers and river-banks, and rural riches, and white houses, and, above all and round them all, the mountain girdle, waving, flowing, musical, stupendous! Nothing is wanting to the perfection of such a land, but a moral grandeur, a grace and elevation of the human character, equal to that of the landscape. And that too is here! Here lived, and lives, a race of men who fought during nine hundred years against Saxon, Danish, Norman invaders, and while successive races of those mingled oppressors and oppressed, yielded to the yoke of the next following, smiled on each, from these rock fortresses, unyielding and unyoked! Yet what has it availed? That same love of mother land, the same dauntless resistance to the death against subjugation, the same long period of triumph over aggression; which, exerted for a much shorter period by the men of early Greece and Rome, has made for them a sort of eternal apotheosis in the world's mind, installed them with their gods in our eternal memories; that very virtue has associated the name of Welshman with little except hot blood and nanny-goats! By Jupiter, I wish Byron or Scott had been Welsh-born, for thy sake, Wales!"

Stage Second.

THE VALLEY OF LLAN Y MAWDDWY.

The Major-The Quaker-The Parson-Doctor Jaques, and Two Boys.

Quaker. Friend Doctor, I've taken care of thy progeny, behold! How faredst thou, and the kites, and the fern owls, in your lofty inn yonder.

66

Doctor. Sir, I took "mine ease in mine inn" admirably. Look, Gentlemen, all around you, while we sit to rest on this sod-topped low stone wall of a bridge, and tell me what this scene wants which an Alpine landscape can boast, save and except somewhat greater altitude? What a gathering" of mountains is there all about the place we passed yesterday, Dinas Mawddwy, at the head of this valley! Yet you shall find nothing talked about by Warner and Bingley, and most of the tourists, but Mallwyd, two miles distant. Now, Mallwyd is merely the threshold, the vestibule, of nature's temple,-to beg a bit of bombast; while at Dinas you find yourself in the very thick of the glory! a confusion of mountains, green too, and woody and watered.

This tumbling white water, and its rocks under our feet, is the little river Cowarch-how bright! and how bright the leaves of witch elm all about its course! These few houses huddled together here at its conflux with Dovey, shewing their old thatches

in the very course of the cleft rock its channel, assume to be a village. This, sir, is the village of Abercowarch. That peep of Dinas Mawddwy seeming to hang in air on the very precipice of awful Craig y Ddinas, these vast heights on each side, the richness of leaf and wood, corn-field and hay-field, dell and upland, wild home and wild rocks, and doublings of a fine river, all in the little space between, is to me exquisite. Such a piece, to be walled in by romantic mountains, and in with such sweet society, sheep, cows, cottagers and children !

Major. Here's a house vacant for us. The owner is in the hay-fields which we passed, and all his family.

Parson. Looking at this house, we can imagine the necessity the inmates might have for those scythes across their chimneys, which we were told they placed there against the invasion of the "robbers of the black woods." The roof is only a prolongation of this great flat mossy rock, by the road side; we can step on to it, and look down the chimney.

Major. Doctor, I must go in and reconnoitre. Which way? by door or by chimney? By pulling asunder those few upright sticks that I suppose are meant for a chimney-pot, and bound round with a wisp of rushes, I could really make my entry much more gracefully to the company, if there be any; for so I shall appear to them upright, while by the door I must make my debut almost double; and a first introduction is every thing, you know Lord Chesterfield says.

Doctor. No, no, go in lawfully, by all means.

Parson. A ragged sort of roof this.

Quaker. Yea, but the true old British roofing of shingles, nevertheless. The Welsh call it Peithwydden, rough oak, merely split. Look at the rafters. They have all the bark on, and the twigs as they grew. The walls bespeak as primitive a mason, as the interior a carpenter. These rough lumps of quartz and limestone owe little to chisel and mallet, yet, with all its want of brick and mortar, it looks weather proof.

Major (within). Halloo! Nothing answers but a clock and a cricket! It's the house of that family we saw all in the steep meadows haymaking by the Dovey side, I dare say. I'll make an inventory of the gudes (goods), as they call 'em. Item, a huge ebony-looking curiously carved coffer, as big as a tomb, and as heavy, I warrant, as the stone lid of one. Open! zounds what a weight, and full of warm clothing too. Item, a huge pot, like a copper, the Welsh chrothon, suspended on a sway, as they term it, as big as a gibbet for a giant, and turned quite out of the cavern of a chimney into the room.

The gude wife, now, will lift that cauldron off, while full of

boiling whey, in making her cheeses, far more easily than I could who stand six feet three, and am of the masculine gender. Such is habit. How would a cockney's pretty little wife manage such a feat?

Quaker. What a staircase! Is it one, or is it an end of some rock built in to the house, up which goatherds have worn by long clambering a flight of jagged steps? Seriously, it's much like such a mountain staircase.

Doctor. Do you not know that Wales is no longer the land of goats? A Welshman now is no more represented by a goat, than his dialect ever was by the "Cot" and " pless" of Shakspeare, or Miss Edgeworth's imitations of him, where she makes a Cardiff hostess talk like Sir Evans.

Major. What a well stored cratch is here! Confound it for making the cieling a foot lower, so that I can't stand. Several sides of bacon, a great many dried fish, a month's supply of oatcakes, and all sorts of tools, sticks, and sundries.

Quaker. Don't you call that sort of lattice-shelf a rack?

Doctor. We do, applying it to our horse's cupboard. But the Welsh are right, for their's is the primitive word, as found in old books, and our's a corruption. Half the vulgarisms of our common people are only old fashioned proprieties of language, afeared," for instance.

Parson. On my word, a den of a house!—a human den! A person accustomed to any elegancies of home,—

Quaker (aside.) Who'd think our reverend friend was brought up in a wilder, poorer, farm and house than this by far, and all his friends are happily subsisting on it still? But that's the reason he falls foul of it. It's an old poor friend that he's

determined to cut, and make a stranger of.

Doctor. Despise it as you please, this solid antique home, dusky with leaves, and green banks of mountains bulging in almost (as it looks) at that half door, the steep orchard shining with moist grass all down to the river, that brilliant wild river, that mossy trunked apple-tree that's almost fallen, and dips its boughs into the water, the dew and silence and sunshine all about, the sweet tranquil perspective through the house, the rude but substantial comfort of the indoor scene,—who can really despise it?

Parson. Doctor, you're very right, quite right, I must confess. It is not to be despised, many a gentleman has been born in a worse. But English visitors are apt to despise

Quaker. What a contrast the life of a poor mountain man and a poor city one! What an artificial sort of curse is poverty,

or at least nine tenths of the misery that goes under its name, after all.

Doctor. Poverty is, indeed, Janus-faced. On one side is a filthy fiend; on the other, I had almost said, a gracious smiling angel.

Quaker. Thou mayst say it boldly. These people have very little money, want every thing but necessaries; yet, perhaps, heaven could hardly add to their felicity.

Doctor. About this hour now, a London wife, in low and narrow circumstances, is just risen in a noisome room, with sickly children, up three or four flight of stairs, puffing at brimstone and tinder, no fire, no comfort; all in the confusion all was left by a drunken husband last night, at half-past twelve: porter-pots, supper relics, candle-ends; a small house full of families, and the dog days at hand! To the gin shop is as regular a first step of the little citizen as the mountaineers" to the hill;" to the pawnbroker's as common a trip of the wretched wife's, as the housewife's to the dairy.

Quaker. Why, this is a weaver's house! Here's another room with a loom in it, and some good strong stuff growing under it.

Major. Nay, nay; and yet it is, for every North Wallian farmer almost is a weaver. A loom's as common as a chest. Look at this web! This strong gwlanen, or high country cloth, as it's called, is all the product of his own labour, and that of his wife and children. Here's winter comfort for backs and beds! Feel it! It does one's heart good to think of snow-time and snow-winds, and clutch such stuff as this; coat or blanket in one's hand, it's a fair handful, one grasp of it.

Quaker. Truly, while we look at this, we cease to wonder that sheep have all but supplanted the poor goats in Wales.

Doctor. Why, they are more profitable, no doubt; yet I can't help regretting a little the erasure of any national feature. I always feel disposed to shake our bearded friends by the paw, when I do chance to espy one with his beard tinged with dew and butter cups, browsing on whatever knoll of rock he can perch on, retaining his old" pride of place" still, under the misfortunes of his tribe. But sheep are poetical creatures, if goats are picturesque ones.

Major. What a pity, doctor, that you were born a little too late for the golden age! The poet, Crabbe, has broken in on our dreams with his stern realities, in such a way that one cannot even conceit a likeness to it in modern rustic life.

Doctor. Sir, it's a lamentable thing that that fine poet was not