“I hope it will. It is a fine country for a man to walk in with a light heart, or, the next best thing, with a heavy heart. They will treat you well, because they will take you for a red-haired Welshman and you like pastry. But what I wanted to say was that the man who first told that story of Craig-y-Dinas was one of the prime walkers of the world. Look at this portrait of him....”
Here Mr Morgan opened a small book of our grandfather’s time which had for a frontispiece a full-length portrait of a short, old, spectacled man in knee breeches and buckled shoes, grasping a book in one hand, a very long staff in the other.
“Look at him. He was worthy to be immortalised in stained glass. He walked into London from Oxford one day and mentioned the fact to some acquaintances in a bookshop. They were rather hard of believing, but up spoke a stranger who had been observing the pedestrian, his way of walking, the shape of his legs, and the relative position of his knees and ankles whilst standing erect. This man declared that the Welshman could certainly have done the walk without fatigue; and he ought to have known, for he was the philosopher, Walking Stewart.
“It was as natural for this man in the picture to walk as for the sun to shine. You would like to know England, Mr Stodham, as he knew Wales, especially Glamorgan. Rightly was he entitled ‘Iolo Morganwg,’ or Edward of Glamorgan, or, rather, Ned of Glamorgan. The name will outlive most stained glass, for one of the finest collections of Welsh history, genealogies, fables, tales, poetry, etc., all in old manuscripts, was made by him, and was named after him in its published form—‘Iolo Manuscripts.’ He was born in Glamorgan, namely at Penon, in 1746, and when he was eighty he died at Flimstone in the same county.
“As you may suppose, he was not a rich man, and nobody would trouble to call him a gentleman. But he was an Ancient Briton, and not the last one: he said once that he always possessed the freedom of his thoughts and the independence of his mind ‘with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride.’
“His father was a stonemason, working here, there, and everywhere, in England and Wales, in town and country. When the boy first learnt his alphabet, it was from the letters cut by his father on tombstones. His mother—the daughter of a gentleman—undoubtedly a gentleman, for he had ‘wasted a pretty fortune’—taught him to read from the songs in a ‘Vocal Miscellany.’ She read Milton, Pope, ‘The Spectator,’ ‘The Whole Duty of Man,’ and ‘Religio Medici,’ and sang as well. But the boy had to begin working for his father at the age of nine. Having such a mother, he did not mix with other children, but returned nightly to read or talk with her, or, if he did not, he walked by himself in solitary places. Later on, he would always read by himself in the dinner-hour instead of going with his fellow-workmen to the inn. Once he was left, during the dinner-hour, in charge of a parsonage that was being repaired, and, having his own affairs to mind, he let all the fowls and pigs in. His father scolded him, and he went off, as the old man supposed, to pout for a week or two with his mother’s people at Aberpergwm, near Pont Neath Vaughan. It was, however, some months before he reappeared—from London, not Aberpergwm. Thus, in his own opinion, he became ‘very pensive, very melancholy, and very stupid,’ but had fits of ‘wild extravagance.’ And thus, at the time of his mother’s death, though he was twenty-three, he was ‘as ignorant of the world as a new-born child.’ Without his mother he could not stay in the house, so he set off on a long wandering. He went hither and thither over a large part of England and Wales, ‘studying chiefly architecture and other sciences that his trade required.’”
“There was a mason,” said Mr Stodham, “such as Ruskin wanted to set carving evangelists and kings.”
“No. He knew too much, or half-knew too much. Besides, he hated kings.... Those travels confirmed him in the habit of walking. He was too busy and enthusiastic ever to have become an eater, and he found that walking saved him still more from eating. He could start early in the morning and walk the forty-three miles into Bristol without any food on the way; and then, after walking about the town on business, and breaking his fast with bread and butter and tea, and sleeping in a friend’s chair, could walk back again with no more food; and, moreover, did so of choice, not from any beastly principle or necessity. He travelled thus with ‘more alacrity and comfort,’ than at other times when he had taken food more frequently. He always was indifferent to animal food and wine. Tea was his vice, tempered by sugar and plenty of milk and cream. Three or four distinct brews of an evening suited him. Once a lady assured him that she was handing him his sixteenth cup. He was not a teetotaller, though his verses for a society of journeymen masons ‘that met weekly to spend a cheerful hour at the moderate and restricted expense of fourpence,’ are no better than if he had been a teetotaller from his cradle:
“‘Whilst Mirth and good ale our warm spirits recruit,