receives a matrass, knowing it to be stolen, a carn-lleidyr, seeing
that he is worse than the thief who stole it, or in calling a
knavish attorney a carn-lleidyr, seeing that he does far more harm
than a common pick-pocket; or in calling the Pope so, seeing that
he gets huge sums of money out of people by pretending to be able
to admit their souls to heaven, or to hurl them to the other place,
knowing all the time that he has no such power; perhaps, indeed, at
the present day the term carn-lleidyr is more applicable to the
Pope than to any one else, for he is certainly the arch thief of
the world. So much for Carn-lleidyr. But I must here tell you
that the term carn may be applied to any who is particularly bad or
disagreeable in any respect, and now I remember, has been applied
for centuries both in prose and poetry. One Lewis Glyn Cothi, a
poet, who lived more than three hundred years ago, uses the word
carn in the sense of arrant or exceedingly bad, for in his abusive
ode to the town of Chester, he says that the women of London itself
were never more carn strumpets than those of Chester, by which he
means that there were never more arrant harlots in the world than
those of the cheese capital. And the last of your great poets,
Gronwy Owen, who flourished about the middle of the last century,
complains in a letter to a friend, whilst living in a village of
Lancashire, that he was amongst Carn Saeson. He found all English
disagreeable enough, but those of Lancashire particularly so -
savage, brutish louts, out-and-out John Bulls, and therefore he
called them Carn Saeson."

"Thank you, sir," said my companion; "I now thoroughly understand
the meaning of carn. Whenever I go to Chester, and a dressed-up
madam jostles against me, I shall call her carn-butein. The Pope
of Rome I shall in future term carn-lleidyr y byd, or the arch