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remarks which occasionally disgrace his composition, talks of "Carnaby Market, and Billinsgate-street!" Where the latter is situated, we have yet to learn.

Henry the Eighth, to whom tyrannical and sensual as he was, we shall ever stand indebted for our emancipation from ecclesiastical thraldom, was the first to relieve Wales from the oppressive jumble of incoherent and jarring statutes under which its natives had long groaned. After various preliminary enactments, all of which tended only to show the inadequacy of half measures, the act of Union, or rather that of assimilating the laws and customs of Wales to those of England, was passed in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of this sovereign; who is thought by our author, to be far more deserving the appellation of the Welsh Justinian, than Edward the First was of that of the English Justinian, which was conferred upon him by the Lord Chief Justice Coke. By the same act, the different counties and shire towns of Wales were empowered to return representatives to Parliament. It was afterwards declared, 35th Hen. VIII. c. 2., that they were "entitled to the same fees and wages as the representatives of the English counties and boroughs; and provided that the writ de solutione feodi Militis Parliamenti, should issue to the sheriffs in Wales to levy them whenever required.”

The tenth chapter comprises remarks on a somewhat heterogeneous assemblage of subjects, as language, manners, popular opinions and prejudices, customs, commerce, projects, turnpike roads, &c. The Welsh are described as possessing an "almost enthusiastic veneration for their ancient language;" to which, and to the natale solum, is ascribed all "that nationality of character which, surviving the ravages of time, still continues undiminished in the Cambro-British breast." In this part of his work, Mr. Jones comments on the errors of those writers who, either from prejudice or defective information, have drawn a false character of the natives of Wales; among others, that tenth wonder of antiquarianism, that benighted luminary of the Goths, the fretful Pinkerton,' comes for in distinguished and deserved reprehention. On this theme our author grows warm; and who can wonder that his indignation should be excited at language so vituperative against the Celts, as that which Pinkerton has poured forth with all the growling volubility of a triple-headed Cerberus. Those of our readers who have not seen the "Inquiry into the History of Seotland," will be surprised to learn with how

much virulent abuse a whole nation have been stigmatized by this gentleman, who in that fell spirit of wild eccentricity and invective which characterise so many of his opinions, but with a strange forgetfulness of common sense, affirms, that "the Celtic is of all savage languages the most confused, as the Celts are of all savages the most deficient in understanding," though in the same work he acknowledges himself to be "ignorant of the Celtic tongue!" Among the further examples of his scurrility quoted by Mr. Jones, are the following:

The Celts from all ancient aecounts, and from present knowledge, were and are a savage race, incapable of labour or even the rude arts; being indeed mere savages, and worse than the savages of America, remarkable, even to our own times, for a total neglect of agriculture themselves, and for plundering their neighbours. The Irish Celts, the Scotch Celts, and the Welsh Celts, have all alike a claim to the character; and when it begins to pass away, it is a sign that, by intermarrying, the Gothic blood begins to exceed the Celtic, and that the Celts are no longer Celts, though so accounted *." Again, "the Celts are savages, have been savages since the world began, and will be for ever savages; mere radical savages, not yet advanced even to a state of barbarism; and if any foreigner doubts this, he has only to step into the Celtic parts of Wales, Ireland, or Scotland, and look at them; for they are, just as they were, incapable of industry or civilisation, even after half their blood is Gothic +." He assumes also that " their language is derived from the English; and to say that the writer is a Celt, is to say that he is a stranger to truth, modesty, and morality;" and to complete the whole, and crown this climax of abuse, he says, "what a lion is to an ass, a Goth is to a Celt ‡." P. 276, 277.

Such are the reveries of Mr. Pinkerton! He is not the only one, however, that is charged by Mr. Jones with "asserting facts without foundation:" the ephemeral tribe of tourists, who, buzzing through the principality like summer knats, blister the "fair fame" of its natives with their ill-concocted crudities, fall equally beneath his reprehension.

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"One of these gentry" (says our author), "a man of eminence and knowledge in his profession, but who will not be persuaded that he does not excel in the sublime, though he has no taste for that style further than dealing in the marvellous, tells us he was disturbed at Crickhowel by a number of people who were amusing themselves, as his hostess informed him, with hearing the trial of a woman accused of SORCERY. The gentry and clergy,' says he, 'of the county are all met together, determined to have a complete bout of it in the assembly room below (which by the bye is above stairs), a trial in the morning, a feast in the afternoon, and a ball in the eve«¿ * Dissert. 68.' " P f Ibid.

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p. 195. Ibid. p. 69, note.

ning!!*-Mine hostess (good woman!) knows no more about the meaning of the word sorcery than she does of the crime. To say that there could be no such trial here, is almost superfluous, but the fact is, that there was no such accusation. There happened to be a monthly meeting of the magistrates of the hundred in the house when this traveller and his nephew came there, before whom a woman was brought, not for witchcraft, but for imposing upon the peasantry of the country, and obtaining money under pretence of fortune telling; and in the evening of the same day the gentlemen and ladies of the vicinity had appointed an assembly, where, for ought [aught] I know, some of those very justices may have joined in the dance after the business of the day was over.'

P. 279.

So much, then, for the "trial for sorcery." We could ourselves quote many other instances of the marvellous, in the flights of this traveller of antiquarian celebrity, who "was wont," as Mr. Jones truly states, "to pursue his researches in company with his nephew!" or at least, of a female who passed under that appellation; and whose sex we believe was once accidentally discovered at Salisbury.

The account of the popular superstitions and customs of the modern Welshmen is entertaining, as our readers will readily estimate from the following extracts.

*

"We have been frequently told that the Welsh are remarkably superstitious, and that most, if not all of them, believe in the reality of apparitions; this is idle assertion and mere conjecture: they have no more superstition nor credulity than falls to the lot of the humble inhabitants of an equal tract of land in any other part of the kingdom: they have, it is certain, their stock stories, their provincial demons and goblins, and their characteristic phænomena, with whom many are acquainted, most wish to hear of, and some few believe. Among the visionary beings of whom tradition tells, and whom imagination creates, we fre quently hear of the fairiest, whom they call bendith eu mammau

"Gent. Mag. 1805.

"Fairies, or destinies, are of different origin; some proceed from the gods, some from the genii, and others from the dwarfs. The hornies or fairies sprung from a good origin, are good them, selves, and dispense good destinies; but those men to whom misfortunes happen, ought to ascribe them to evil hornies or fairies. The dwarfs, from whom the evil fairies are supposed to have sprung, are described in the Edda as a species of beings bred in the dust of the earth, just as worms are in a dead carcase. It was indeed ⚫ from the body of the giant Ymir they issued: at first they were only worms; but by order of the gods they partook of both human shape and reason; nevertheless they dwell in subterraneous caverns and among the rocks.' Edda, Fable the 7th, Mallet's North Antiq. Vol. II. p. 42.".

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and y tylwyth têg, i. c. the blessings of their mothers, the fairies or fair household, meaning that they were fair of form, though most foul in mind. The stories related of these fairies, as well as of witches, who were supposed to play tricks with the milk-maid, and spoil the butter, are similar to those heard in England. Fairies are undoubtedly of Gothic origin, as appears from Icelandie Sagas and the Edda, or Runic mythology: they were divided into good and bad, and regarded by the Northern tribes as having the absolute disposal of the human race. From the Goths the superstition spread, with their arms, among the nations whom they subdued and enslaved. The same idea prevailed on the continent of Asia, and particularly in the East. Mr. Mallet observes, that the notion is not every where exploded, that there are in 'the bowels of the earth fairies, or a kind of dwarfish and tiny beings of human shape, remarkable for their riches, their activity, ↑ and their malevolence.' In many countries in the North, the people are still firmly persuaded of their existence. In Iceland at this day the good folks show the very rocks and hills in which they maintain that there are swarms of these small subterraneous men of the most tiny size, but of the most delicate figures. Our Welsh fairies are certainly of the same family-hatched in the same hot-bed of imagination. Let us compare the legends of Edmund Jones* with the above description of Mr. Mallet. latter tells us, they are little, active, and malevolent, and that they reside in rocks and mountains; the sad historian of Aberystruth says, they appeared often in the form of dancing companies; and when they danced, they chiefly, if not always, appeared like children, and not as grown men, leaping and frisking in the air,' that they were desirous of enticing people into their company, and then used them ill;' that they were quarrelsome to a proverb, insomuch that it was said of people at variance, Ni chydunant hwy mwy na bendith eu mammau ; 2. c. they'll no more agree than the fairies; that they seemed * not to delight in open plain ground of any kind far from stones and wood, nor in watery but in dry grounds not far from trees.* The parallel is here remarkably correct, and the inference will naturally occur that both had the same origin. There are indeed few of our popular superstitions that may not be traced up to some opinion which was consecrated by the religion of the Goths or Celts; nor (to use the language of Mallet) need we always except ⚫ those which seem in some respects to hold a conformity to doctrines ⚫or practices which the Christian religion alone could have taught

us.

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"Besides these diminutive representatives of men, the Welsh have also fiends peculiar to themselves, or at least generally forgotten by the majority of the inhabitants of the island; these they call cin Anwn+ or Anwn's dogs. Anwn is translated by Owen, unknown; but it is rather as 'poor plodding Richards' has it, anwfn, bottomless;

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and the prince of this country who is personified in the Mabynogion may be called the king of immensurable darkness, of that boundless void or space in which the universe floats, or is suspended. This being (say the gossips) is the enemy of mankind, and his dogs are frequently heard hunting in the air, some time previous to the dissolution of a wicked person: they are described, in the beautiful romance to which I have referred, to be of a clear white colour with red ears; no one, with us, pretends to have seen them, but the general idea is, that they are jet-black.-To these dogs I conceive Shakespeare alludes in his Tempest, when he talks of noise of hunters heard in the air, and spirits in the shapes of hounds, and not to Peter de Loier, who,' says Malone in a note, [states that] Hecate* did use to send dogges unto men to fear and terrify them, as the Greeks affirmed.'

"The corpse candle, which precedes the death of some person in the neighbourhood, and marks the route of the funeral from the house of the deceased to the church, is also a very common topic among our peasantry, who believe it confined to the diocese of St. David's: a tradition is likewise very commonly received among them, which preserves the memory of certain extraordinary and wonderful feats of strength, performed by two oxen of prodigious size, called ychain banog, or the oxen of the summits of the mountains. Davies in his Celtic Researches calls them elevated oxen,' and supposes them to allude to a sacrifice made by Hu Gadarn, or Hu the Mighty; but whatever may have been the origin of the legends told of these oxen, the tradition seems to have been derived from the mythology of the Druids, and in some measure confirms the antiquity of the Triads, from whence it is evidently derived +.

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"The funerals in Wales, and the ceremonies preceding and following them, very much resemble those of the Irish, as described in that admirable little volume, entitled Castle Rack Rent. The straw on which the deceased lay, is set on fire soon after the breath departs, which is a signal of that event. We have our gwylnôs or night of watching, and when ale can be procured in the neighbourhood, a llawennôs or night of rejoicing, though this latter phrase is more generally appropriated to the night before a wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom meet and spend the hours in mirth, for the supposed purpose of watching the bride and preventing her flight or concealment. These weddings were formerly attended with some very extraordinary customs, all of which are now disused in the towns and their vicinities; but in the hills some few remain, particularly what is called the

"The Prince of Anwn and Hecate are man and wife, and both are the parents of this fable. For this and many other peculiarities relative to Wales, Shakespeare was probably indebted to Sir John Price the antiquary, a native of Breconshire, who lived much in the English court in the reigns of Henry the Eighth and his daughter Elizabeth."

"See Triad 75 in the first volume of Myvyrian Archaeology.

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