months he was in the habit of devoting to the superintendence of the
affairs of the widow and fatherless: one of his principal delights was to
assist merit, to bring it before the world and to procure for it its
proper estimation: it was he who first discovered the tuneful genius of
blind Parry; it was he who first put the harp into his hand; it was he
who first gave him scientific instruction; it was he who cheered him with
encouragement and assisted him with gold. It was he who instructed the
celebrated Evan Evans in the ancient language of Wales, enabling that
talented but eccentric individual to read the pages of the Red Book of
Hergest as easily as those of the Welsh Bible; it was he who corrected
his verses with matchless skill, refining and polishing them till they
became well worthy of being read by posterity; it was he who gave him
advice, which, had it been followed, would have made the Prydydd Hir, as
he called himself, one of the most illustrious Welshmen of the last
century; and it was he who first told his countrymen that there was a
youth of Anglesey whose genius, if properly encouraged, promised fair to
rival that of Milton: one of the most eloquent letters ever written is
one by him, in which he descants upon the beauties of certain poems of
Gronwy Owen, the latent genius of whose early boyhood he had observed,
whom he had clothed, educated and assisted up to the period when he was
ordained a minister of the Church, and whom he finally rescued from a
state bordering on starvation in London, procuring for him an honourable
appointment in the New World. Immortality to Lewis Morris! But
immortality he has won, even as his illustrious pupil has said, who in
his elegy upon his benefactor, written in America, in the four-and-twenty
measures, at a time when Gronwy had not heard the Welsh language spoken
for more than twenty years, has words to the following effect:--

"As long as Bardic lore shall last, science and learning be
cherished, the language and blood of the Britons undefiled, song be
heard on Parnassus, heaven and earth be in existence, foam be on the
surge, and water in the river, the name of Lewis of Mon shall be held
in grateful remembrance."

CHAPTER XLI

The Pier--Irish Reapers--Wild Irish Face--Father Toban--The Herd of
Swine--Latin Blessing.

The day was as hot as the preceding one. I walked slowly towards the
west, and presently found myself upon a pier, or