r with his family he
moved in search of new fortunes. Glamorganshire was at least a better
climate than Bute; no groups of idle or of busy reapers could here stand
waiting on the guidance of a master, for there was no farm here;--and
among its other and probably its chief though secret advantages,
Llanblethian was much more convenient both for Dublin and London than
Kaimes Castle had been.

The removal thither took place in the autumn of 1809. Chief part of the
journey (perhaps from Greenock to Swansea or Bristol) was by sea: John,
just turned of three years, could in after-times remember nothing of
this voyage; Anthony, some eighteen months older, has still a vivid
recollection of the gray splashing tumult, and dim sorrow, uncertainty,
regret and distress he underwent: to him a "dissolving-view" which not
only left its effect on the _plate_ (as all views and dissolving-views
doubtless do on that kind of "plate"), but remained consciously present
there. John, in the close of his twenty-first year, professes not
to remember anything whatever of Bute; his whole existence, in that
earliest scene of it, had faded away from him: Bute also, with its
shaggy mountains, moaning woods, and summer and winter seas, had been
wholly a dissolving-view for him, and had left no conscious impression,
but only, like this voyage, an effect.

Llanblethian hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and orchard and
other trees, on the western slope of a green hill looking far and wide
over green meadows and little or bigger hills, in the pleasant plain of
Glamorgan; a short mile to the south of Cowbridge, to which smart little
town it is properly a kind of suburb. Plain of Glamorgan, some ten
miles wide and thirty or forty long, which they call the Vale of
Glamorgan;--though properly it is not quite a Vale, there being only one
range of mountains to it, if even one: certainly the central Mountains
of Wales do gradually rise, in a miscellaneous manner, on the north
side of it; but on the south are no mountains, not even land, only
the Bristol Channel, and far off, the Hills of Devonshire, for
boundary,--the "English Hills," as the natives call them, visible from
every eminence in those parts. On such wide terms is it called Vale of
Glamorgan. But called by whatever name, it is a most pleasant fruitful
region: kind to the native, interesting to the visitor. A waving grassy
region; cut with innumerable ragged lanes; dotted with sleepy unswept