the good taste to be proud of this. The river Dee--Milton's "wizard
stream"--celebrated both by English and Welsh bards, is not seen to as much
advantage under the walls of the Roman "camp" (_castra_=Chester) as
elsewhere, but its bridges serve to supply the want of fine scenery,
especially the Old Bridge, which crosses the river just at its bend, and
whose massive pointed arches took the place, when they were first built, of
a ferry by which the city was entered at the "Ship Gate," whence now you
look over "the Cop" or high bank on the right side of the stream, and view,
as from a dike in Holland, the reclaimed land stretching eight miles beyond
Chester, though the resemblance ceases at Saltney, where behind the
iron-works tower the Welsh hills--Moel-Famman conspicuous above the
rest--that bound the Vale of Clwyd.

The Dee is more a Welsh than an English river. It rises in the bleak
mountain-region of Merionethshire, the most intensely Welsh of all
counties, above Bala Lake, which is commonly but incorrectly called its
source. Thence it flows through the Vale of Llangollen, famous in poetry,
and waters the meadows of Wynnestay, the splendid home of one of Wales's
most national representatives, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, and only beyond
that does it become English by flowing round and into Cheshire. On a very
tiny scale the Dee follows something of the course of the Rhine: three
streamlets combine to form it; these unite at the village of Llanwchllyn,
and the river flows on, a mere mountain-torrent, past an old farmhouse,
Caer-gai, lying on a desolate moor at the head of Bala Lake, and through
the lake itself, after which its scenery alternates, like the Rhine's below
Constance, between rocky gorges and flat moist meadows dotted with hamlets,
churches and towns. Bala--otherwise Lin-Jegid and Pimblemere ("Lake of the
Five Parishes")--has some traditional connection with the great British
epic, or rather with its accessories--the _Morte d'Arthur_--of which
Tennyson has availed himself in _Enid_, mentioning that Enid's gentle