vent the rise of any Welsh institution. Glendower's projected Parliament, archbishopric, and University disappeared; and his fall was followed by a harsh and repressive legislation;-no Welshman was to take office under government, or to defend his house, or to carry arms, or to sit in judgment on an Englishman. unity. 1536. The Lancastrians introduced no Tudor order into Wales, while jealously guarding against the rise of a Welsh prince. Under the New Monarchy, a Court was placed at Ludlow, to carry out the repressive policy that had remained a dead letter so long. In 1536, Henry VIII. drew Wales into a closer union with England, the march lordships were formed into seven new counties, and the whole of Wales was given a representation in the English Parliament. The old repressive policy was carried out successfully, but in a new spirit. The Welshman was to forget his language, and to become Anglicised, before becoming a true citizen. of the state over the prosperity and the law and the religion of which Henry VIII. presided. The Welsh leader ceased to be a rebel, and became an English courtier. He took an honourable place in the history and in the literature of England during the Elizabethan golden age. The year 1536 is not the end of A new begin- the history of Wales; but it may ning. well be taken as the end of one great period. Before 1536, in mediæval Wales, we get the history of the princes. After 1536, in modern Wales, we get the history of the peasantry. Before 1536, we trace the decline and fall of the Welsh ruling aristocracy; after 1536, we trace the rise of the Welsh people. Glendower had done something more wonderful than calling spirits from the vasty deep, he had called the people into power during a few eventful years. The ploughman had become the hero of Owen's bards. Justification by faith, presupposing equality among men, became the dominant theological idea soon after 1536; the introduction of printing enabled the people to enter into the pale of literature; the discovery of gunpowder made the coat of mail, and the hitherto impregnable castle, useless. Clearly, thought and power were no Civil War. longer the exclusive possession of the aristocracy. But the Welsh people waited long The Great before entering into their heritage. They were ignorant and superstitious; the Reformation robbed them of their images and candles, but gave them. no new light. They followed the country gentlemen in the Great Civil War, in blind loyalty to the king, to be massacred on Tewkesbury plain, or within the stormed walls of Bristol. With the exception of English Pembroke, so important at more than one critical time during the war,the whole of Wales transferred, to a king it did not know, with its characteristic enthusiasm, the loyalty that had made it suffer so much in the cause of its own princes. Practical and business-like men like Archbishop Williams, and impulsive hot-heads like Sir John Owen, placed their all at the service of the anointed king. During the Commonwealth, the Puritans tried to do for Wales what the Protestant Reformers had done for England. They tried to force upon the people a religion they did not like and could not understand. The parson, who had stepped into the place of the priest, as the priest had stepped into the place of his heathen predecessor, owed much of his influence to his supposed knowledge of magic. The godly Puritan majorgeneral came, and the parson had to give place to preachers who wielded the sword of God and of Gideon. But the echo which Puritanism awakened in Wales was faint and short. The mystic doctrines of Morgan Llwyd,-with Cromwell frowning on every page, and the intemperate preaching of Vavassour Powel, had no very wide influence. Still, even in Wales, a small minority forsook their traditional fidelity to their superiors, and found what they declared to be perfect freedom in the service of their God. Wales, also, sent many refugees to the wilds of America, which a Welshman had first pointed out as a place of refuge for those who were persecuted for truth's sake. But the great majority welcomed the Restoration, and Wales willingly fell back to its old quietness and superstition. In Wales, as in England, the The Welsh Tudors had called into being the power that was to destroy their policy. In 1588, Whitgift,-of all the Tudor ministers the strongest advocate of absolute unity in politics and religion, had helped a Welsh clergyman to publish the whole of the Welsh Bible. It did not, apparently, do anything to prevent the Anglicising of Wales. The higher classes, in due obedience to their sovereign, were trying to forget their Welsh. Church appointments soon became political, and the bishops had no sympathy with the people and no influence over thein. That Welsh Bible, after many days, however, became the inspiration of Welsh national consciousness, the beginning of a new era in Welsh history and in Welsh literature. During the latter half of the eighteenth century it became the property of the whole people,Howell Harris roused the peasant from his sloth and superstition, and Griffidd Jones' circulating schools brought education within the reach of the poorest. The religious and literary revival did not directly affect the church or the ruling aristocracy; it drew the mass of the people out of the church, and added a difference of religion to the many differences already growing between the people and their rulers. While this great, but silent, reThe rise of volution was changing the creed industry. and the character of the Welshman, the mineral wealth of Wales was beginning to affect the history of the country. At the end of the eighteenth century, the copper works of Swansea were a hundred years old, and the furnaces of Merthyr Tydfil half as much, but the population of Cardiff did not reach two thousand, and all the coal of Merthyr was car ried on donkeys' backs. Within less than a century the population of Cardiff became 150,000, and Glamorgan and Monmouth made greater strides than any county within our islands. Material wealth and prosperity brought greater independence and new ideals. The new spirit first manifested itself in a wild outburst of Chartisın, but it soon settled down into a slow and mighty movement, guided, at the same time, by the revolutionary doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and by the intensely The legislation of the last ten Special years has given the Welsh peasantry a large measure of control over their own affairs. The British Parliament has specially legislated for Wales in two directions, it has struck one blow at the prevailing sin of drunkenness, and it has satisfied the desire for education by the Intermediate Education Act of 1889, followed by the charter which makes the dream of Owen Glendower,—a University of Wales, a reality. Local Government. The County Council Act of 1888 has profoundly affected the history of Wales, and its action will be completed by the Parish Councils Act. It has given the control of local government to the men educated in institutions of their own creation, the Sunday school and the literary meeting. Even in days gone by, days of the disfranchisement of Wales, the genius of the Welsh people was a genius for construction rather than for rebellion. Unaided by Government, and against the will of officials, it has created its own voluntary system of religion and education. The British Parliament seems now to be recognising the results of the labours of the creators of modern Wales, and to be giving it an opportunity,-by means of the extension of local government which is characteristic of our age,-of still further renewing its youth in the future. The history of Wales is simple and easy. Its mountains will always give it a history of its own. The history of its princes is complete, Tudur Aled has bewailed the fall of the last of them, I. THE FIRST EVENING WITH HENRY VAUGHAN. Let us begin with Henry Vaughan the Silurist. You can easily procure the works of George Herbert, with which it will be interesting to compare some of Vaughan's poems given on these pages. You might profitably read the history of his time also, in S. R. Gardiner's little book-The Puritan Revolution. I select, to begin with, poems illustrating (1) the influence of the Great Civil War on literature. (2) the rise and growth of the feeling of delight in the wild beauty of nature. We hear echoes of the Great War in Vaughan, but the echoes are softer than in Milton. We see in Vaughan the delight in the beauty of nature which is so characteristic of the poetry of our own day, though far removed from the intensity it reaches in Wordsworth. It is worth remembering that the Usk is the first river to have its wild beauty described in English literature, and that Vaughan, in describing it, did much to awaken the muse of Wordsworth. You will see from the following poems that Henry Vaughan was a strong Royalist, idealising the beheaded king, and referring to Oliver Cromwell as a tyrant. Still he has much of the earnestness of Puritanism. In him, more than in any other poet, we get the grace and beauty of the Cavalier, and the purity of the Roundhead. I. PEACE. MY soul, there is a country Afar beyond the stars, Where stands a winged sentry There, above noise and danger, Sweet peace sits, crowned with smiles, And One born in a manger Commands the beauteous files. He is thy gracious friend And (O my Soul awake!) To die here for thy sake. If thou canst get but thither, There grows the flower of peace, II. THE RETREAT. HAPPY those early days, when I Or taught my soul to fancy ought a' O how I long to travel back, I V. THE STORM. SEE the use; and know my blood But a shallow, bounded flood, Though red as he; Yet have I flows as strong as his, And boiling streams that rave With the same curling force, and hiss As doth the mountained wave. But when his waters billow thus, Incite them to that fierce discuss, Thus the enlarged, enraged air But still the weather that's most fair Y THE COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WALES. April 7th, 1894. ESTERDAY, on the sixth of April, 1894, the governing body of the University of Wales met for the first time. It was difficult to realise, as we sat in the dingy Privy Council Chamber at Whitehall, that the hopes of so many years were being amply fulfilled. It was diffiIt was difficult to believe that Wales, so lately without any educational institution at all, was now in possession of a University. To my mind, the day was a prouder one than a day of victory. Our historian has no battle of Granson or battle of Bannockburn to describe, he can not show the fall of tyranny at the dissolution of a Union of Calmar, he can not dilate on the crowning of a heroic struggle for liberty in a Treaty of Munster. But the sixth of April, 1894, was a day for us that Switzerland, or Scotland, or Sweden, or Holland might have placed side by side with their most glorious days. a Prime Minister, in opening the proceedings of the first meeting of its Court, "will be a place in the main for poor students. It will not be a place to which men of wealth will come and put the final polish on a leisurely course of education fastidiously gone through, but it will be the place where the son of a peasant or farmer or a mechanic may come and grasp, with a hard and even a horny hand, the weapons with which he means to carve out his career." A glance at the eighty members of the Court present would have been enough proof of Lord Rosebery's saying. With a few splendid exceptions, they were the descendants of those peasants who have made the life of Wales what it is to-day. We were still waiting for Lord Rosebery and Mr. Acland, when a Black and White photographer came in. He placed his camera in a corner and turned its eye upon us. Must it be confessed that we, It was the day of the crowning triumph who had been sacrificing our time and of a struggle that is almost unique in the means in the interest of the generations to history of the world. It was the day of come, were instantaneously and unconthe establishing of a peasants' University. sciously acted upon by our ineradicable A people, without help from the educated Celtic vanity? Thinking about ourselves classes, suspected and distrusted by those was ridiculous at such a historic moment, who ought to have led them, rose out of when the glory of the future of our ignorance and superstition, created country was unfolding itself before us,system of education that is second to none still we straightened ourselves up and cast in the world, and demanded a University, a side glance at the lens. I sat behind two not as an ornament to please a short-lived mighty county councillors from Monmouthpatriotism, but as an institution necessary shire, and feared that fame was denied to the working of an enduring education- me unless I stood on my feet, as some al machinery. The new University has did. I shifted my chair however, and my been recognized by government as the face may be seen peering over the University of the peasants of Wales. It shoulders of my big friends. The photocan almost be said that there was no class grapher took the cap off at last. No proin Wales too ignorant to take an interest cess is instantaneous in that dim light, and in the work of the sixth of April. The we thought that the plate was being exUniversity is the glorious result of a posed for a quarter of an hour. I heard struggle carried on by the disinterested violent coughing during that time, and I labour of peasant leaders, it is the crown. must have turned my head many times, of a system of education maintained by for I saw many people moving in different the hard-earned pence of the peasant directions. We were to have another farmer and labourer, it is the long expect- chance. "Now," said the photographer, as ed realisation of the dream of the peasant he exposed another plate, "quite still, poet. "This University," said the Queen's please." |