nergy, intelligence, and skill
of our labouring population. The English mind is intensely practical,
and the English working man, for the last two centuries at least, has
been mainly distinguished for his great mechanical aptitude, bursting
out, here and there, in exceptional persons, under the form of
exceedingly high inventive genius.

At our very doors, however, there is a small nation of largely
different blood and of wholly different speech from our own; a nation
forming a part of our own kingdom, even more closely than the Scotch or
the Irish, and yet in some respects further from us in mind and habit
of life than either; a nation marked rather by the poetical and
artistic, than by the mechanical and practical temperament--the ancient
and noble Welsh people. It would hardly be reasonable to expect from
the Welsh exactly the same kind of success in life which we often find
in English workmen; the aims and ideals of the two races are so
distinct, and it must be frankly confessed the advantage is not always
on the side of the Englishman. The Welsh peasants, living among their
own romantic hills and valleys, speaking their own soft and exquisite
language, treasuring their own plaintive and melodious poetry, have
grown up with an intense love for beauty and the beautiful closely
intwined into the very warp and woof of their inmost natures. They
have almost always a natural refinement of manner and delicacy of
speech which is unfortunately too often wanting amongst our rougher
English labouring classes, especially in large towns. They are
intensely musical, producing a very large proportion of the best
English singers and composers. They are fond of literature, for which
they have generally some natural capacity, and in which they exercise
themselves to an extent unknown, probably, among people of their class
in any other country. At the local meetings of bards (as they call
themselves) in Wales, it is not at all uncommon to hear that the first
prize for Welsh poetry has been carried off by a shepherd, and the
first prize for Welsh prose composition by a domestic servant. In
short, the susceptibilities of the race run rather toward art and
imagination, than toward mere moneymaking and practical ingenuity.

John Gibson, sculptor, of Rome, as he loved to call himself, was a
remarkable embodiment, in many ways, of this self-respecting, artistic,
ideal Welsh peasant temperament. In a little village near Conway, in