has told a man called Dafydd Tibbot, that he is a Frenchman--"Dearie me,
sir, am I indeed?" says the man, very pleased--he supposes the man a
descendant of a proud, cruel, violent Norman, for the descendants of
proud, cruel and violent men "are doomed by God to come to the dogs." He
tells us that he comforted himself, after thinking that his wife and
daughter and himself would before long be dead, by the reflection that
"such is the will of Heaven, and that Heaven is good." He showed his
respect for Sunday by going to church and hesitating to go to
Plynlimmon--"It is really not good to travel on the Sunday without going
into a place of worship." He wished, as he passed Gwynfe, which means
Paradise,--or _Gwynfa_ does; but no matter,--that he had never read Tom
Payne, who "thinks there's not such a place as Paradise." He lectures a
poet's mistress for not staying with her hunchbacked old husband and
making him comfortable: he expresses satisfaction at the poet's late
repentance. After praising Dafydd as the Welsh Ovid and Horace and
Martial, he says:

"Finally, he was something more; he was what not one of the great Latin
poets was, a Christian; that is, in his latter days, when he began to
feel the vanity of all human pursuits, when his nerves began to be
unstrung, his hair to fall off, and his teeth to drop out, and he then
composed sacred pieces entitling him to rank with--we were going to say
Caedmon--had we done so we should have done wrong; no uninspired poet
ever handled sacred subjects like the grand Saxon Skald--but which
entitle him to be called a great religious poet, inferior to none but the
_protege_ of Hilda."

(Here, by the way, he omits to correct the plural unity of the "Quarterly
Reviewer.")

But perhaps these remarks are not more than the glib commonplaces of a
man who had found Christianity convenient, but not exactly sufficient. In
another place he says: "The wisest course evidently is to combine a
portion of the philosophy of the tombstone with a portion of the
philosophy of the publican and something more, to enjoy one's pint and
pipe and other innocent pleasures, and to think every now and then of
death and judgment--that is what I intend to do, and indeed is what I
have done for the last thirty years." Which is as much as to say that he
was of "the religion of all sensible men": which is as much as to say
that he did not greatly trouble about such matters.

In the cognate matter of pat