was about to be held; a meeting which has for its object (I quote the
words of its promoters) 'the diffusion of useful knowledge, the
eliciting of native talent, and the cherishing of love of home and
honourable fame by the cultivation of poetry, music, and art.' My
little boys were disappointed; but I, whose circus days are over, I,
who have a professional interest in poetry, and who, also, hating all
one-sidedness and oppression, wish nothing better than that the
Celtic genius should be able to show itself to the world and to make
its voice heard, was delighted. I took my ticket, and waited
impatiently for the day of opening. The day came, an unfortunate
one; storms of wind, clouds of dust, an angry, dirty sea. The Saxons
who arrived by the Liverpool steamers looked miserable; even the
Welsh who arrived by land,--whether they were discomposed by the bad
morning, or by the monstrous and crushing tax which the London and
North-Western Railway Company levies on all whom it transports across
those four miles of marshy peninsula between Conway and Llandudno,--
did not look happy. First we went to the Gorsedd, or preliminary
congress for conferring the degree of bard. The Gorsedd was held in
the open air, at the windy corner of a street, and the morning was
not favourable to open-air solemnities. The Welsh, too, share, it
seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show and
spectacle. Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race
and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little
awkward and resourceless in the organisation of a festival. The
presiding genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth-
century costume, relieved only by a green scarf, the wind drowning
his voice and the dust powdering his whiskers, looked thoroughly
wretched; so did the aspirants for bardic honours; and I believe,
after about an hour of it, we all of us, as we stood shivering round
the sacred stones, began half to wish for the Druid's sacrificial