poets and musical performers compete for prizes on given subjects, which
are announced beforehand on large placards throughout the Principality.
The subjects for competition are for the most part patriotic, but
religion and loyalty are supreme throughout the eisteddfod. The
successful competitors are crowned or decorated by the fair hands of lady
patronesses, who distribute the prizes. This yearly gathering of the
rank, beauty, wealth and talent of the Principality, to commemorate their
nationality and foster native genius, edified and delighted by the gems
of Welsh oratory, music and song, cannot but be a laudable institution as
well as pleasant recreation. Some of the foremost English journals, who
devote columns of their best narrative talent to record a horse race, a
Scottish highland wrestle, or hideous prize fight with all their
accompaniments of vice and brutality, may surely well spare the ridicule
and contempt with which they visit the pleasant Welsh eisteddfod. Their
shafts, howsoever they may irritate for the time, ought surely not to
lower the Welshman's estimate of his eisteddfod, seeing the antiquity of
its origin, the praiseworthiness of its objects, the good it has done,
the talent it has developed,--as witness, a Brinley Richards and Edith
Wynne,--and the delight it affords to his country people. Enveloped in
the panoply of patriotism, truth and goodness, he may well defy the
harmless darts of angry criticism and invective, emanating from writers
who are foreign in blood, language, sympathy and taste. When the Greeks
delighted in their olympic games of running for a laurel crown, the
Romans witnessed with savage pleasure the deadly contentions of their
gladiators, the Spaniards gazed with joy on their bloody bull fights, and
the English crowded to look at the horse race or prize fight, the Cymry
met peaceably in the recesses of their beautiful valleys and mountains to
rehearse the praises of religion and virtue, to sing the merits of
beauty, truth and goodness, and all heightened by the melodious strains
of their national lyre.