Principality of Wales. A year after she made two more grants: one to Cornelius Devosse, and the other to William Humphrey and Christopher Shutz. These foreigners ultimately divided part of their tenure into shares, which they sold, and formed a body, incorporated under the title of "The Governor, Assistants, and Commonalty of the Mines Royal." By all these instruments, as well as by those of former reigns, a power was given to sink shafts anywhere except in gardens, or underneath the foundations of castles or houses. Thus were the mineral resources of the country-instead of being dealt out piecemeal to favourites and courtiers too ignorant or indolent to estimate their value, or pursue their improvement-placed under the direction of such a public body as could remedy in some degree the bancful effects, without abandoning the high pretensions, of an unlimited prerogative. Such was the foundation then laid for those great manufacturing interests, which required, and ultimately obtained, a solid independence, fortified against the attacks of arbitrary power, and exposed to none but the very remote danger of our declining industry as a people.

Public attention now being directed into this channel, the discovery of metallic veins became so frequent, that the company, doubting, perhaps, the success of all the ventures which were proposed to them, began to farm their exclusive rights to enterprising individuals. The Cardiganshire mines, among the most abundant in lead and silver, were, during the whole of the seventeenth century, precisely in this situation.

Sir Hugh Myddelton, whose enterprising character

and great wealth render him somewhat of a hero in mining annals, realized the greater part of his property by farming the chief mines in Cardiganshire, which he held from the Governor and Company of Mines Royal at a yearly rent of four hundred pounds. He coined his silver into crowns, angels, &c., in Aberystwith Castle; and so profitable were his ventures, that from one mine alone, yielding one hundred ounces of silver from one ton of lead, he derived a clear profit of two thousand pounds a month. This princely revenue was all expended in his great work of supplying the city of London with water-an undertaking which had terrified every other adventurer; but which Sir Hugh completed in the reign of James I., who, with his court, was present at the first opening of this grea public work. Sir Hugh, like many more public benefactors, impoverished himself for the benefit of thousands, and his family declined into narrow circumstances, while he himself practised as a surveyor, to help his shattered finances. Sir Hugh Myddelton was succeeded in these mines by Mr. Bushell in the reign. of Charles I., of whom mention has been made in the account of Aberystwith Castle.

The sojourner at Aberystwith will do well to visit the chief mining-stations around that place, not alone on account of the internal wealth of the mountain-ranges by which he will find himself surrounded, but to become acquainted with the peculiarly wild, vast, and generally sterile character of the scenery. The districts most rich in mineral treasures are almost invariably the most barren in vegetative beauty, but their "Huge crags and knolls coufus'dly hurled,"

broken into rugged glens, or traversed by deep and dark ravines, where the impetuous mountain torrents roar along, are magnificently grand, and serve well to enhance the sylvan loveliness of the graceful vales so often found beside these gloomy regions of hidden wealth.

I know not a better route for showing the gradation of Cardiganshire scenery than the way from Aberystwith to the mines of Daren. The road crossing a high hill, north-east of the town, leads you for some time in view of the luxuriant woods, pastures, and cornfields, which make the Rheidol valley such a garden of beauty, girt with swelling hills, and watered by its fair river. Shortly, in a narrow but avenue-like lane, you pass Gogerddan, surrounded by all of comfort, luxury, and beauty that nature and art can combine for man's enjoyment. Farther on, after passing the race-ground, the hedgerows become less thickly planted with fine trees, and the landscape loses much of its wooded richness. Soon a straggling dirty village, of such cottages as I have formerly described, offers its divers impediments of pigs, poultry, pots, and pans, to the traveller, and as he emerges from its peat-smoke atmosphere, the scene generally grows more and more wild, cultureless, and vast, till enormous hilly masses of moorland, heaped mountain-wise one over another, form the whole expanse of country, varied only by the silvery threads of gushing streamlets, the alternating tints of gorse and heather, and the thinly scattered dwellings of the peasantry. Amid scenery of this character, on the road to Machynlleth, is the remarkable cist-vaen, supposed by some persons to be the burial-place of the bard

Taliesin, and called Gwely Taliesin, or Taliesin's bed; and the popular superstition is, that should any one sleep a night in this bed, he would the next day become either a poet or a fool. Sir S. R. Meyrick, whose great antiquarian lore entitles his opinions to general credence, considers it rather the monument of a Druid, and the matter-of-fact Camden says, "I take this, and all others of this kind, for old heathen monuments, and am far from believing that ever Taliesin was interred here." The last information we have respecting Taliesin leaves him at the court of King Alfred, who loved so well to retain around him the gifted of his age, that it appears unlikely that the bard would have returned to the comparatively uncivilized region where we find his supposed grave. Many of this poet's compositions are still extant, and have much of the grave, solemn, and peculiar beauty of the ancient Welsh minstrelsy.

CHAPTER IV.

PLINLIMMON-LLANGURIG-RHAIADYR-NEW RADNOR.

High o'er his mates, how huge Plinlimmon lifts
His many-beaconed head!-O'er-coronalled
With still and shadowy mist,-or rolling storms
That speak loud-voiced to the echoing hills,
And rouse repeated thunder.

Where, dancing onward, like a sportive child,
A gushing streamlet frolics in the light,
Gushing from rock to rock, as though its waves
Were the transformed feet of mountain nymph,
And these her wonted haunts. And even so
May our fantastic fancy deem her yet-

That brook is e'en Plinlimmon's fairest child-
The peerless WYE.-L. A. TWAMLEY.

HITHERTO I have been wandering at will, and leading my readers in an erratic and uncertain track, whither chance and my wayward fancy directed. Now our path will be restricted, at least for the present, to the banks of the river Wye, which, as our heroine for the time being, shall receive careful attention in our proposed biographical and topographical memoir.

My own Wye-ward progress having been made from Aberystwith, I cannot, perhaps, do better than marshal my readers the way I went. On quitting the interesting