George Borrow

“ Yes; the Cymric or British race were dispossessed of Britain with the exception of that part which they still emphatically call Cumrie, but which by other people is called Wales. There they remained independent for a long time, governed by their own princes; and there, though now under the sway of England, they still preserve their venerable language, the oldest in the world, with perhaps the exception of the Gaulic or Irish, with which it is closely connected. Wales is not a Cymric but a Saxon or Teutonic word, bestowed on the land of the Cymry by the seed of Hengist. ”

“ She is the mother of the four female deceivers of the city of Destruction; she is the mother of Death; she is the mother of every evil and misery; and she has a fearful hold on every living man: her name is Sin. “He who escapes from her hook, for ever blessed is he,” said the angel. Thereupon he departed, and I could hear his voice saying, “Write down what thou hast seen, and he who shall read it carefully, shall never have reason to repent.”
The above is an outline of the work of Elis Wyn—an extraordinary work it is. ”

“ The friend turns out to be Ease—pleasant Ease—on whose merits he expatiates with great eloquence, and with whom he requests them to co-operate. ‘Go with her,’ says he, ‘and keep everybody in his sleep and his rest, in prosperity and comfort, abundance and carelessness, and then you will see the poor honest man, as soon as he shall drink of the alluring cup of Ease, become a perverse, proud, untractable churl; the industrious labourer change into a careless waggish rattler; and every other person become just as you would desire him . ”

“ He was the son of Cynan, an expatriated prince of Gwynedd, by Raguel, daughter of Anlaf or Olafr, Dano-Irish king of Dublin and the fifth part of Ireland. After a series of the strangest adventures he succeeded in regaining his father’s throne, on which he died after a glorious reign of fifty years. He was the father of Owen Gwynedd, one of the most warlike of the Welsh princes, and was grandsire of that Madoc who, there is considerable reason for supposing, was the first discoverer of the great land in the West. A truly remarkable book is the one above mentioned, which narrates his life. ”

“ The mighty Hu with mead would pay
The bard for his melodious lay;
The Emperor of land and sea
And of all livings things was he. [21b]
For many years after the death of Hu the Cymry retrograded instead of advancing in civilization; they ceased to be a united people; plunder and devastation were of daily occurrence among them; every one did as he pleased, as far as in his power lay; there was no law, but the law of the strongest ”

“ In assuming the title of ‘Sleeping Bard’ Elis Wyn committed a kind of plagiarism, as it originated with a certain poet who flourished in the time of the Welsh princes, some nine hundred years before he himself was born, and to this plagiarism he humorously alludes in one of his visions. The visions are described in prose, but each is followed by a piece of poetry containing a short gloss or comment. The prose is graphic and vigorous, almost beyond conception; the poetry wild and singular, each piece composed in a particular measure. ”

“ Many and great poets flourished in the times of the Welsh princes: the three greatest were Meilyr, Gwalchmai, and Dafydd Benfras. Meilyr was bard of Gruffudd ap Cynan, prince of Gwynedd or North Wales, who died in 1137. He sang the praises of his master, who was a celebrated warrior and a bountiful patron of the muse, in whose time and under whose sanction those forms of composition, generally called the twenty four measures, were invented and promulgated. ”

“ The Druidical verses then probably constituted the most ancient poetry of Britain. These verses were communicated orally, and were never written down whilst bardism or druidism lasted, though the bards and druids at a very early period were acquainted with the use of letters. Whether any genuine bardic poetry has been preserved, it is impossible to say; it is the opinion, however, of Cymric scholars of reputation, that certain ancient strains which the Welsh possess, which are composed in a measure called Englyn milwr, are either druidical strains or imitations of such. ”

“ After wandering from nook to nook, the Bard and his guide at last come to the court before the palace of the hellish regions, where, amidst thousands of horrible objects, the Bard perceives two feet of enormous magnitude, reaching to the roof of the whole infernal firmament, and inquires of his companion what those horrible things may be, but is told to be quiet for the present, as on his return he will obtain a full view of the monster to whom they belong, and is then conducted into the palace of Lucifer, who is about to hold a grand council. ”

“ He was a foundling, discovered in his infancy lying in a coracle on a salmon weir, in the domain of Elphin, a prince of North Wales, who became his patron. During his life he arrogated to himself a supernatural descent and understanding, and for at least a thousand years after his death he was regarded by the descendants of the ancient Britons as a prophet or something more. The poems which he produced procured for him the title of “Bardic King.” They display much that is vigorous and original, but are disfigured by mysticism and extravagant metaphor. ”

“ Griffith ap Nicholas was a powerful chieftain of South Wales, something of a poet and a great patron of bards. Seeing with regret that there was much dissension amongst the bardic order, and that the rules of bardism were nearly forgotten, he held a bardic congress at Carmarthen, with the view of reviving bardic enthusiasm and re-establishing bardic discipline. The result of this meeting—the only one of the kind which had been held in Wales since the days of the Welsh princes—to a certain extent corresponded with his wish. ”

“ Many of the professedly Christian Welsh bards when speaking of the Deity have called Him Hu, and ascribed to the Creator the actions of the creature. Their doing so, however, can cause us but little surprise when we reflect that the bards down to a very late period cherished a great many druidical and heathen notions, and frequently comported themselves in a manner more becoming heathens than Christian men. ”

“ In the Vision of Hell, a devil, who returns from the world to which he has been despatched, and who gives an account of his mission, says that he had visited two young maidens in Wales who were engaged in turning the shift. Not a few people—ladies, amongst the rest—will be disposed to ask what is meant by turning the shift. ”

“ In the midst of the palace is a gulf, of yet more horrible and frightful aspect than hell itself, which is continually opening and closing, and which, the angel says, is the month of ‘Unknown’ or extremest hell, to which the devils and the damned are to be hurled for ever on the last day. The council is held in order to devise measures for the farther extension of the kingdom of Lucifer. ”

“ A word or two here on Cymric rhyme and measures.
In Welsh poetry rhyme is found in a twofold shape: there is alliteration, that is rhyme produced by the same letters following each other at certain distances in the body of the line, then there is the common rhyme, produced by two or more lines terminating with the same letters. In the older Welsh poetry, by which we mean that composed before the termination of the first millennium, both rhyme and alliteration are employed, but in a less remarkable manner than in the bardic effusions of comparatively modern times. ”

“ But I can tell you that she was a triple-faced giantess, having one very atrocious countenance turned towards the heavens, barking, snorting, and vomiting accursed abomination against the celestial King; another countenance, very fair, towards the earth, to entice men to tarry in her shadow ”

“ Like the Gaelic word Alban, it means a hilly or mountainous region, and is connected with wall, wold, and wood. The Germans, from very early times, have called the Cymry Welsh or Waldenses, and the country where they happened to be, Welschland. They still apply to Italy the name of Welschland, a name bestowed upon it by their ancestors, because it was originally principally peopled by the Cymry, whom the Germans called Welsh from the circumstance of their inhabiting some mountainous or forest country in the far East, when they first came in contact with them. ”

“ He is particularly desirous that Britain should be subject to him, and requests the advice of his counsellors as to the best means to be employed in order to accomplish his wish. Various infernal potentates then arise and give him their advice, each of whom is a personification of some crime, vice, or folly. The debate is frequently interrupted by the sound of war; for, as the angel observes, there is continual war in hell. ”

“ It is to be remarked that all the souls introduced in this vision are those of bad people, with the exception of those of the poets which the Bard meets in limbo. A dark intimation, however, is given that there is another court or palace, where Death presides under a far different form, and where he pronounces judgment over the souls of the good. ”

“ Perhaps, however, he wished to impress upon people’s minds the awfulness of dying in an unrepentant state, from the certainty, in that event, of the human soul being forthwith cast headlong down the precipice of destruction. ”

“ This poem, which is generally considered by the Welsh as the brightest ornament of their ancient language, was composed at Donnington, a small hamlet in Shropshire, on the north-west spur of the Wrekin, at which place, as has been already said, Gronwy toiled as schoolmaster and curate under Douglas the Scot, for a stipend of three-and-twenty pounds a year.’ [28]
The prose literature of Wales is by no means so extensive as the poetical ”

“ The same thing is said in Spain of the ‘Life of Ignatius Loyola.’ Peter Williams, in ‘Lavengro,’ the Welsh preacher who was haunted with the idea that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, is frequently mentioning the work of Elis Wyn. Amongst other things, he says that he took particular delight in its descriptions of the torments of hell. We have no doubt that many an Englishman, of honest Welsh Peter’s gloomy temperament, when he reads the work in its present dress will experience the same kind of fearful joy. ”

“ She is larger than the entire earth, and is yet daily increasing, and a hundred times more frightful than the whole of hell. She caused hell to be made, and it is she who fills it with inhabitants. If she were removed from hell, hell would become paradise ”

“ The island at the time of the arrival of the Cymry had, as has already been intimated, a scanty population. This population consisted of Gael or Gauls, a people of cognate race to the Cymry, and speaking a language much the same as theirs, differing from it, however, in some respects. Hu and his people took possession of the best parts of the island, either driving the few Gaels to other districts or admitting them to their confederacy. As the country was in a very wild state, much overgrown with forests in which bears and wolves wandered, and abounding with deep stagnant pools, which p. ”

“ In a late number of the Transactions of the Dublin Ossianic Society—a most admirable institution—there is an account of the early life of Fin ma Coul, in which the burnt finger is mentioned; but that number did not appear till more than a year subsequent to the publication of the ‘Romany Rye,’ and contains not the slightest allusion either to Fafnisbane, i.e. the slayer of Fafnir, or Taliesin—to the Eddacal or the Cumric legend. ”

“ He lies buried in the graveyard of the beautiful church of Llan Silien, in Denbigshire. The stone which covers his remains is yet to be seen just outside the southern wall, near the porch. The last great poet of Wales was a little swarthy curate;—but this child of immortality, for such he is, must not be disposed of in half a dozen lines. The following account of him is extracted from an unpublished work, called ‘Wild Wales,’ by the author of ‘The Bible in Spain’:—
‘Goronwy, or Gronwy, Owen was born in the year 1722, at a place called Llanfair Mathafrn Eithaf, in Anglesea. ”

“ The Arch-Fiend, in a speech which he makes, boasts that three parts of the world have already been brought to acknowledge his sway, chiefly through the instrumentality of his three daughters—Pleasure, Pride, and Lucre; and he hopes that eventually the whole world will be brought to do the same. ”

“ After the Cymric or British race had been established in the island about 1300 years, they were invaded by the Romans, under Julius Cæsar. The king, who at that time p. 22ruled in Britain, was called Caswallon; he was a great warrior and much beloved by his subjects. In him and his Britons the Romans found their match and more, for after a month’s hard fighting and skirmishing, they were compelled to betake themselves to Gaul, the country from which they had come. ”

“ Third, the Saxons . . . ’
So much for the historical Triad: now for the moral. The following are selected from a curious collection of admonitory sayings, called the ‘Triads of the Cumro, or Welshman:’—
‘Three things should a Cumro always bear in mind lest he dishonour them: his father, his country, and his name of Cumro.
‘There are three things for which a Cumro should be willing to die: his country, his good name, and the truth wherever it be.
‘Three things are highly disgraceful to a Cumro: to look with one eye, to listen with one ear, and to defend with one hand. ”

“ He was loaded with riches and honours by Henry VII., and was an especial favourite with Henry VIII., who used to call him Father Preecc, my trusty Welshman. He was a great warrior, a consummate courtier, and a very wise man; for whatever harm he might do to people, he never spoke ill of anybody. ”

“ This street is the street of True Religion. The angel conducts him down the three principal streets, and procures him glances into the inside of various houses. The following scene in a cellar of what is called the street of Pleasure, goes far to show that the pen of Elis Wyn, at low description, was not inferior to the pencil of Hogarth ”