“‘I would, your hanner; and why not? for in spite of what I have heard Father Toban say, I am by no means certain that all Protestants will be damned.’
“‘Farewell,’ said I.
“‘Farewell, your hanner, and long life and prosperity to you! God bless your hanner and your Orange face. Ah, the Orange boys are the boys for keeping faith. They never served me as Dan O’Connell and his dirty gang of repalers and emancipators did. Farewell, your hanner, once more; and here’s another scratch of the illigant tune your hanner is so fond of, to cheer up your hanner’s ears upon your way.’
“And long after I had left him I could hear him playing on his fiddle in first-rate style the beautiful tune of ‘Down, down, Croppies Lie Down.’”
CHAPTER XXX—“WILD WALES” (continued)
Much more than in any of his other books Borrow is the hero in “Wild Wales”—a strange black-coated gentleman with white hair striding over the hills and along the rivers, carrying an umbrella, asking innumerable questions and giving infinite information about history, literature, religion, politics, and minor matters, willing to talk to anyone, but determined not to put up at a trampers’ hostelry. The Irish at Chester took him for a minister, the Irish reapers in Anglesey took him for a priest and got him to bless them in Latin while they knelt. All wondered to hear the Saxon speaking or reading in Welsh. A man who could speak Spanish addressed him in that language as a foreigner—“‘I can’t tell you how it was, sir,’ said he, looking me very innocently in the face, ‘but I was forced to speak Spanish to you.’” At Pentre Dwr the man with the pigs heard his remarks on pigs and said: “I see you are in the trade and understand a thing or two.” The man on the road south to Tregaron told him that he looked and spoke like the Earl of Leicester.
He reveals himself also without recourse to impartial men upon the road. The mere figure of the tall man inquiring for the birthplaces of poets and literally translating place names for their meaning, is very powerful in holding the attention. He does not conceal his opinions. Some were already familiar to readers of Borrow, his admiration for Smollett and for Scott as a writer, his hate of gentility, Cavaliers, Papists, France, sherry, and teetotalism. He had some bad ale in Wales, and he had some Allsopp, which he
declared good enough for the summer, and at Bala one of his best Welshmen gave him the best of home-brewed, “rich and mellow, with scarcely any smack of the hop in it, and though so pale and delicate to the eye nearly as strong as brandy.” The Chester ale he spirted out of the window after the Chester cheese. To his subjects of admiration he also adds Robert Southey, as “not the least of Britain’s four great latter poets, decidedly her best prose writer, and probably the purest and most noble character to which she has ever given birth”; but this was when he was thinking of Madoc, the Welsh discoverer of America. I should be sorry to have to name any of the other “four poets” except Byron. Another literary dictum is that Macpherson’s “Ossian” is genuine because a book which followed it and was undoubtedly genuine bore a strong resemblance to it. An opinion that shows as fully as any single one could Borrow’s vivid and vague inaccuracy and perversity is this of Snowdon:
“But it is from its connection with romance that Snowdon derives its chief interest. Who when he thinks of Snowdon does not associate it with the heroes of romance, Arthur and his knights? whose fictitious adventures, the splendid dreams of Welsh and Breton minstrels, many of the scenes of which are the valleys and passes of Snowdon, are the origin of romance, before which what is classic has for more than half a century been waning, and is perhaps eventually destined to disappear. Yes, to romance Snowdon is indebted for its interest and consequently for its celebrity; but for romance Snowdon would assuredly not be what it at present is, one of the very celebrated hills of the world, and to the poets of modern Europe almost what Parnassus was to those of old.”
Who associates Snowdon with Arthur, and what Arthurian stories have the valleys and passes of Snowdon for their scenes? what “poets of modern Europe” have