Welsh and
the Irish tongue. Wales--the Wales of the people--became profoundly
impressed by the religious sentiment and the heroic and profound
poetry of the Hebrews, and gained from them a new stimulus to express
itself and its needs and aspirations in its own native way and in its
own tongue.

A characteristic expression of the homelier moral humor of the Welsh
is to be had in the 'Canwyll y Cymry' (Candle of Wales), by Rhys
Pritchard, the famous Elizabethan vicar of Llandovery, which for two
centuries was the most popular book in Wales after the Bible. Its
simple rhymed didactics do not often rise into poetry; but they are
full of human feeling, expressed in a terse and proverbial way, with
distinct individuality. The book easily leads one on to the very
remarkable band of hymn writers, from Anne Griffiths to Williams
Pantycelyn, who have flourished in Welsh. These, and some score
beside, really rank by their imaginative fervor and inspiration as
true poets. In quite another vein, but probably a very ancient and
traditional one in Welsh, we have the homely interludes of Twm O'r
Nant, who was born about 1750, of whose life George Borrow gives a
very vigorous account in 'Wild Wales.' A greater than Twm O'r Nant,
and born a generation earlier, Gronney Owen, a man of the finest
poetic genius, ought to have a special interest for American readers
because he was practically exiled from his beloved Anglesea by the
ungrateful church he served; and died, poor and broken-hearted, in New
Brunswick about the year 1780. His 'Cywydd y Faru' (Ode to the Day of
Judgment), his touching lines to his little daughter Elin, or his
Hogarthian lines upon the London garret in which he lived for a time,
may be cited as showing the various sides of his poetry, of which
unluckily there are no adequate translations yet forthcoming.

In prose we must not omit to mention the 'Bardd Cwsg' (The Sleeping
Bard) of Elis Wynne,--a very imaginative and idiomatic prose
epic-in-little, describing the bard's vision of a curiously Welsh
Inferno. Wynne's prose style is remarkably fine and pure, modeled on
the best Biblical standard of a Welsh without English admixture. Welsh
prose has been admirably handled too by some of the divines who have
flourished within the past two centuries, and who have not confined
their eloquence to the pulpit. Even when the State church had no
sympathy with the Welsh people and their language, many of its
individual members d