les Gronwy sought for it in England, and
after some time procured the curacy of Oswestry in Shropshire, where he
married a respectable young woman, who eventually brought him two sons
and a daughter.

From Oswestry he went to Donnington near Shrewsbury, where under a
certain Scotchman named Douglas, who was an absentee, and who died Bishop
of Salisbury, he officiated as curate and master of a grammar school for
a stipend--always grudgingly and contumeliously paid--of three-and-twenty
pounds a year. From Donnington he removed to Walton in Cheshire, where
he lost his daughter who was carried off by a fever. His next removal
was to Northolt, a pleasant village in the neighbourhood of London.

He held none of his curacies long, either losing them from the caprice of
his principals, or being compelled to resign them from the parsimony
which they practised towards him. In the year 1756 he was living in a
garret in London vainly soliciting employment in his sacred calling, and
undergoing with his family the greatest privations. At length his friend
Lewis Morris, who had always assisted him to the utmost of his ability,
procured him the mastership of a government school at New Brunswick in
North America with a salary of three hundred pounds a year. Thither he
went with his wife and family, and there he died sometime about the year
1780.

He was the last of the great poets of Cambria and, with the exception of
Ab Gwilym, the greatest which she has produced. His poems which for a
long time had circulated through Wales in manuscript were first printed
in the year 1819. They are composed in the ancient Bardic measures, and
were with one exception, namely an elegy on the death of his benefactor
Lewis Morris, which was transmitted from the New World, written before he
had attained the age of thirty-five. All his pieces are excellent, but
his masterwork is decidedly the Cywydd y Farn or "Day of Judgment." 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.

CHAPTER XXXI

Start for Anglesey--The Post-Master--Asking Questions--Mynydd Lydiart--Mr
Pritchard--Way to Llanfair.

When I started from Bangor, to visit the