WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



670 



and a short account of the men and places mentioned by the Bards, by 

 the Rev. Mr. Evan Evans, curate of Llanvair Talyhaern, in Denbigh- 

 shire," (London, 1764). It was the first book in which the claims of 

 the Welsh bards were brought under the notice of the English public. 

 Evans Bays in his preface that it " was first thought of and encouraged 

 some years before the name of Ossian was heard of in England," but 

 it was evidently the success of Macpherson's Ossian which had brought 

 the project to maturity. " Certainly," says the author in a Welsh 

 address to Mr. Richard Morris, printed in the volume, " I would not 

 have taken this labour upon me except to put a stop to the reproaches 

 of the English, who say that we have nothing of poetry to show the 

 world, while one of the Scotch Highlanders has translated portions of 

 their ancient bard, or rather has dressed up and adorned some recent 

 production and put it forth in his name." He is not sparing of his 

 insinuations against the genuineness of Ossian, and his critical remarks 

 on the ancient bards of Wales are marked by acuteness. His 

 greatest mistake is that he does not question the truth of the massacre 

 of the bards, of which he remarks that it " gave occasion to a very fine 

 ode by Mr. Grey." ' Evans's own prose translation of pieces by Gwalchmai 

 and others also gave occasion to some imitations by Gray, which, though 

 of no great merit, are of all translations from the Welsh by far the 

 most extensively known. His volume concludes with an excellent 

 proposal to send a literary traveller through Wales to examine and 

 transcribe the remains of ancient poetry ; but it appears to have met 

 with cold neglect. Evan Evans was born in 1731, and died in 1789. 

 He entered the church, but rose to no higher position than that of a 

 curate in a parish said to derive its name from the ancient bard, 

 Tulhaiarn, and which also gave birth to the living bard, Talhaiarn. As 

 .1 Welsh poet his reputation is now even higher than during his lifetime. 

 Theophilus Jones, the historian of Brecknockshire, says in a letter 

 written in 1797, " I did not think Evan Prydydd Hir (the bardic name 

 of Evans) the poet he was. I knew him well, but I suppose the cierie 

 had expelled the airen before I became acquainted with him." Despair 

 appears to have driven the disappointed man of talent to drink, and at 

 the time of his death, in 1 789, he was reported to have perished in a 

 state of intoxication on a mountain, a report which happily appears to 

 be unfounded. He left behind him a good collection of transcribed 

 manuscripts, which passed on his death to Mr. Panton, of Anglesey, 

 who had allowed him an annuity on that condition. Two volumes of 

 Welsh sermons published by him contained an English preface so 

 caustic as to be said to have stood in the way of his preferment. 



Of the distinguished men of this period none seems to have acted 

 more entirely from internal impulse and to have had a stronger influ- 

 ence on others than Owen Jones. Owen Jones was born at Llanvih- 

 angel Glyn y Myvyr, in Denbighshire, in 1741. " In early life," says 

 the Rev. Robert Williams, " he was sent to London, where he was 

 taken into the employ of Messrs. Kidney and Nutt, furriers in Thames 

 Street, to whose business he eventually succeeded, and he continued 

 to carry it on with credit until his decease," which took place at his 

 house in Thames Street, in 1814, at the age of seventy -three. Count 

 Villemarque', in the preface to his translation of the ancient bards, 

 gives a very poetical sketch of the biography of Owen Jones. " While 

 still a child," he says, " and engaged in herding cows, he could see at a 

 distance rising through the air the snow-covered peak of Snowdon, the 

 Celtic Parnassus, on whose summit whoever slumbers awakes inspired. 

 He ascended it more than once, and his happy inspiration might make 

 us believe that there he must have slept. When he was older, he often 

 witnessed on this mountain the poetical contests of the bards and 

 harpers of the different cantons of the country, and passing at the foot 

 of the ancient castles which held the poetic treasures of his race he 

 formed the daring project of bringing them to the knowledge of the 

 world." 



There are here some palpable mistakes, as in attributing to Snowdon 

 the properties of Cader Idris, on whose summit it is the popular belief 

 that whoever sleeps awakes either cmy or a poet, and it is not probable 

 that Snowdon was often ascended by a Denbighshire boy. But however 

 hyperbolically expressed, the sentiment is correct. In the midst of his 

 prosperous business in London, Owen Jones was still a warm-hearted 

 Welshman, far more munificent in the promotion of his country's 

 literature than all the magnates of the country combined. In 1771 ho 

 founded the society of Gwyneddigion (or Men of Gwynedd, a portion 

 of North Wales), which revived in a manner the ancient congresses of 

 the bards, and distributed prizes among the best performers on the 

 Welsh harp and the writers of the best Welsh poems. In 1789 he 

 published with Owen Pughe the poems of Ab Gwilym, and in 1801 

 and the subsequent years up to 1807 he issued at his expense three 

 volumes of the ' Myvyrian Archaiology,' so called in his honour from 

 Myvyr, the bardic name which he had assumed in remembrance of his 

 native vale of Myvyr, in Denbighshire. Owen Pughe and Edward 

 Williams were, as has been already mentioned, the editors of the work. 

 The chief connection of Jones with the Archaiology was in supplying 

 the funds, and it is said that he thus expended upwards of 10U(M. a 

 large as it wa, by which he cheaply earned the gratitude and 

 respect of all lovers of literature of his own tunes and all to come. 

 His last literary enterprise was the publication of a periodical, 'Y 

 Ureal,' which appeared in 1805 and advanced no further than one 

 volume. In this too, Owen Pugho was the editor and Owen Jones 

 only the Maecenas. The triad of his labours was thus formed by 



the Gwyueddigion Society, the ' Myvyrian Archaiology,' and the 

 ' Greal.' 



William Owen or William Owen Pughe, as he was called in later life 

 after he had inherited some property in Wales, was an antiquary, a 

 lexicographer, and a poet. He was born in 1759, in a primitive part of 

 Merionethshire, close to Cader Idris, from which he assumed the bardic 

 name of Idrison, and he closed a long life in 1835, at the foot of the 

 same mountain, to the vicinity of which he happened to be on a visit. 

 Till he was seven years old he heard not a word of English, and though 

 he went to school at Altringham, near Manchester, and at the age of 

 seventeen was sent up to London to earn his living, he never seems to 

 have acquired a thorough mastery of the English language. His 

 English has always a t;iiut of Welsh in it, while, on the other hand, his 

 colleague, Edward Williams, says that his Welsh writings " may be 

 said to be English written in Welsh words." In the great city he 

 remained for six years without knowing that any other person in it 

 ever thought of the Welsh language and literature, till an accidental 

 meeting with another Welshman, who iutroduced him to Owen Jones, 

 brought into connection two men who scarcely seem to have passed a 

 day without doing something for both. The largest Welsh and English 

 dictionary in existence, published in two large volumes between 1793 

 and 1803, was the work of eighteen years of Owen Pughe's life. It is 

 said in regard to it, by the Rev. R. Williams, that " while Johnson's 

 Dictionary of English, as enlarged by Todd, comprises only 68,000 

 words and W 7 ebster's about 70,000, Owen Pughe's Dictionary of 

 Welsh contains more than 100,000 words, illustrated by 12,000 quota- 

 tions." The dictionary would be much improved by striking out many 

 of these words which appear to exist only in its pages. In it Owen 

 introduced a new system of Welsh orthography, and his friend, the 

 Rev. T. Charles, of Bala, who was appointed at the same time to 

 superintend through the press the edition of the Welsh Bible, the 

 agitation for which had given rise to the British and Foreign Bible 

 Society, took the opportunity of introducing it there ; but the Society 

 interfered and the system was obliged to be dropped. In the second 

 edition of his dictionary, issued at Denbigh, in 1832, the customary 

 spelling is used. There is an abridgment of the work by Owen himself 

 in 1806, which is much too compendious. In 180G Owen came into 

 possession of some property by inheritance, which enabled him to take 

 up his residence in Wales, at Tros-y-Parc, near Denbigh, and to have the 

 command of his time, which he devoted as usual to Welsh literature. 

 His most important work of this period is a translation of ' Paradise 

 Lost ' into Welsh, which has a peculiar importance from his having 

 thrown off in it the shackles of " Cynghanedd " or alliteration, which had 

 fettered the movements of Welsh poetry for centuries. The innova- 

 tion was a most happy one : it was adopted by the Eisteddvod of Caer- 

 marthcn in the same year, and has been followed by many succeeding 

 banls with great advantage. Owen Pughe was known to Southey the 

 poet, and is frequently mentioned in his correspondence, but not always 

 in terms of respect. On one occasion Southey expresses his surprise 

 that Pughe should have translated ' Paradise Lost,' of which, in 

 Southey' s opinion, he could hardly understand a sentence ; and on 

 another Southey says of him, hi a letter to Wynne, " full of Welsh 

 information he certaiuly was, but a muddier-minded man I never met 

 with." That there was some foundation for this opinion may bo 

 inferred from the fact that Pughe was a follower of Joanna Southcott, 

 and was one of her twenty-four elders. Edward Williams, who 

 quarrelled with him in the latter part of his life, said in a letter, in 

 1813, that Owen " with his hMyhorsisms absolutely ruined everything 

 he ever took in hand." 



Edward Williams, still better known by his bardic name of lolo 

 Morganwg, is the third of the three associates of the " Myvyrian 

 Archaiology," and undoubtedly the most gifted of the three. Less for- 

 tunate than his companious, he was born in so low a sphere of life that 

 at the age of nine he began to assist his father at his trade of a stone- 

 mason, and with all his endowments he worked through life at the 

 trade, though never in strong health, and in his old age was in need 

 of the assistance of a public subscription. He was born in 1745, in 

 the parish of Llanearvan, in Glamorganshire, and was noted in youth 

 for absence of mind and literary enthusiasm. On a quarrel with his 

 father he left him abruptly for London, and worked as a stonemason at 

 Blackfriars Bridge. An interview which he sought with Dr. Johnson 

 in a bookseller's shop only left a painful impression of the great lexi- 

 cographer's rudeness ; and though he saw Cowper, the poet, he only 

 saw him in his decline. With Robert Southey he appears to have 

 been intimate, at a time when Southey, like himself, was full of repub- 

 lican ideas, and the English poet drew from him much of the Welsh 

 lore of his ' Madoc," and introduces him as a character in the poem 

 under the name of lolo. Of all English authors of celebrity, Southey 

 took the greatest interest in Welsh history and literature ; and if he 

 had carried out his purpose of fixing his residence in the Vale of Neath, 

 which was only prevented by a trifle, the literary consequences might 

 have been important. He had a high opinion both of the talents and 

 the character of lolo. " Bard Williams is in town," he wrote once to 

 his wife, when on a visit to London, "and so I shall shake one honest man 

 by the hand whom I did not expect to see." Both the bards had a 

 thorough abhorrence of the great metropolis ; and Williams, who at 

 one time proposed to emigrate to America, not, like Southey, to found 

 a Pantisocracy, but to search for the descendants of Madoc and his men, 



