'They went forth to the war, but they always fell.'
OSSIAN

Some time ago I spent some weeks at Llandudno, on the Welsh coast.
The best lodging-houses at Llandudno look eastward, towards
Liverpool; and from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing,
crossing the bay, and taking possession of the beach and the lodging-
houses. Guarded by the Great and Little Orme's Head, and alive with
the Saxon invaders from Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive
point of interest, and many visitors to Llandudno never contemplate
anything else. But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool
steamboats, perhaps the view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one
after a while; the horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the
coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness and aridity. At
last one turns round and looks westward. Everything is changed.
Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness
and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic Anglesey, and
the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn
and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind hill,
in an aerial haze, make the horizon; between the foot of Penmaenmawr
and the bending coast of Anglesey, the sea, a silver stream,
disappears one knows not whither. On this side, Wales,--Wales, where
the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name
its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows
this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings
to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the
invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead, has long ago forgotten his.
And the promontory where Llandudno stands is the very centre of this
tradition; it is Creuddyn, THE BLOODY CITY, where every stone has its