s
the cloud that hides it. The sun is always glad enough to be seen, and
so is the poet. If both are occasionally hid, trust me it is no fault of
theirs. Bear that in mind; and now pray take up your money.'

"'That man is a gentleman,' thought I to myself, 'whether poet or not;
but I really believe him to be a poet; were he not he could hardly talk
in the manner I have just heard him.'

"The man in grey now filled my glass, his own and that of his companion.
The latter emptied his in a minute, not forgetting first to say 'the best
prydydd in all the world!' The man in grey was also not slow to empty
his own. The jug now passed rapidly between my two friends, for the poet
seemed determined to have his full share of the beverage. I allowed the
ale in my glass to remain untasted, and began to talk about the bards,
and to quote from their works. I soon found that the man in grey knew
quite as much of the old bards and their works as myself. In one
instance he convicted me of a mistake.

"I had quoted those remarkable lines in which an old bard, doubtless
seeing the Menai Bridge by means of second sight, says: 'I will pass to
the land of Mona notwithstanding the waters of Menai, without waiting for
the ebb'--and was feeling not a little proud of my erudition when the man
in grey, after looking at me for a moment fixedly, asked me the name of
the bard who composed them--'Sion Tudor,' I replied.

"'There you are wrong,' said the man in grey; 'his name was not Sion
Tudor, but Robert Vychan, in English, Little Bob. Sion Tudor wrote an
englyn on the Skerries whirlpool in the Menai; but it was Little Bob who
wrote the stanza in which the future bridge over the Menai is hinted at.'

"'You are right,' said I, 'you are right. Well, I am glad that all song
and learning are not dead in Ynis Fon.'

"'Dead,' said the man in grey, whose features began to be rather flushed,
'they are neither dead, nor ever will be. There are plenty of poets in
Anglesey. . . .'"

The whole sketch is in Borrow's liberal unqualified style, but keeping on
the right side of caricature. The combination of modesty, touchiness and
pride, without humour, is typical and happily caught.

The chief fault of his Welsh portraits, in fact, is his almost
invariable, and almost always unnecessary, exhibition of his own
superiority. He is nearly always the big clever gentleman catechizing
certain quaint little rustic foreigners. He met one old man with