people. It would hardly be reasonable to expect from the Welsh exactly
the same kind of success in life which we often find in English workmen;
the aims and ideals of the two races are so distinct, and it must be
frankly confessed the advantage is not always on the side of the
Englishman. The Welsh peasants, living among their own romantic hills
and valleys, speaking their own soft and exquisite language, treasuring
their own plaintive and melodious poetry, have grown up with an intense
love for beauty and the beautiful closely intwined into the very warp
and woof of their inmost natures. They have almost always a natural
refinement of manner and delicacy of speech which is unfortunately too
often wanting amongst our rougher English labouring classes, especially
in large towns. They are intensely musical, producing a very large
proportion of the best English singers and composers. They are fond of
literature, for which they have generally some natural capacity, and in
which they exercise themselves to an extent unknown, probably, among
people of their class in any other country. At the local meetings of
bards (as they call themselves) in Wales, it is not at all uncommon to
hear that the first prize for Welsh poetry has been carried off by a
shepherd, and the first prize for Welsh prose composition by a domestic
servant. In short, the susceptibilities of the race run rather toward
art and imagination, than toward mere money-making and practical
ingenuity.

John Gibson, sculptor, of Rome, as he loved to call himself, was a
remarkable embodiment, in many ways, of this self-respecting, artistic,
ideal Welsh peasant temperament. In a little village near Conway, in
North Wales, there lived at the end of the last century a petty
labouring market gardener of the name of Gibson, who knew and spoke no
other tongue than his native Welsh. In 1790, his wife gave birth to a
son whom they christened John, and who grew up, a workman's child, under