xiv] FIRST LITERARY EFFORTS 205 



a great advantage to myself, and which has enabled me to 

 write on a variety of subjects without committing any very 

 grievous blunders (so far as my critics have pointed out), and 

 with, I hope, some little profit to my readers. 



The only other subject on which I attempted to write at 

 this time was on the manners and customs of the Welsh 

 peasantry as they had come under my personal observa- 

 tion in Brecknockshire and Glamorganshire. I have already 

 described how I came to take some interest in agriculture 

 while surveying in Bedfordshire and the adjacent counties, 

 and this interest was increased by a careful study of Sir 

 Humphry Davy's "Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry," which 

 I met with soon afterwards. I was, therefore, the better able 

 to compare the high-class farming of the home counties with 

 that of the ignorant Welshmen, under all the disadvantages of 

 a poor soil and adverse climate, of distant markets, and the 

 almost entire absence of what the English farmer would 

 consider capital. 



Having lived for more than a year on an average Welsh 

 farm at Bryn-coch, while we had often lodged with small 

 farmers and labourers, or at public-houses whose landlords 

 almost always farmed a little land, I got to know a good 

 deal about their ways, and adding to this my own observa- 

 tion of the kind of land they had to farm, and the difficulties 

 under which they laboured, I felt inclined to write a short 

 account of them in the hope that I might perhaps get it 

 accepted by some magazine as being sufficiently interesting 

 for publication. I wrote it out fairly with this intention, and 

 two years afterwards, when in London, I took it to the editor 

 of a magazine (I forget which) who promised to look over it. 

 He returned it in a few days with the remark that it seemed 

 more suited for an agricultural journal than for a popular 

 magazine. I made no other offer of it, and as it was my 

 first serious attempt at writing, though I am afraid it is rather 

 dull, I present it to my readers as one of the landmarks in 

 my literary career. I may add that I have recently visited 

 the Upper Vale of Neath, and renewed my acquaintance with 



