Go visit old Saint Taffy twice.’
He wrote quantities of hymns. Once, to get some girls out of a scrape—one having played ‘The Voice of Her I Love’ on the organ after service—he wrote a hymn to the tune, ‘The Voice of the Beloved,’ and fathered it on an imaginary collection of Moravian hymns. One other virtue he had, as a bard: he never repeated his own verses. God rest his soul. He was a walker, not a writer. The best of him—in fact, the real man altogether—refused to go into verse at all.
“Yet he had peculiarities which might have adorned a poet. Once, when he was on a job in a churchyard at Dartford, his master told him to go next morning to take certain measurements. He went, and, having taken the measurements, woke. It was pitch dark, but soon afterwards a clock struck two. In spite of the darkness he had not only done what he had to do, but he said that on his way to the churchyard every object appeared to him as clear as by day. The measurements were correct.
“One night, asleep in his chair, three women appeared to him, one with a mantle over her head. There was a sound like a gun, and one of the others fell, covered in blood. Next day, chance took him—was it chance?—into a farm near Cowbridge where he was welcomed by three women, one hooded in a shawl. Presently a young man entered with a gun, and laid it on the table, pointing at one of the women. At Iolo’s warning it was discovered that the gun was primed and at full cock.
“Another time, between Cowbridge and Flimstone, he hesitated thrice at a stile, and then, going over, was just not too late to save a drunken man from a farmer galloping down the path.
“In spite of his love of Light and Liberty, he was not above turning necromancer with wand and magic circle to convert a sceptic inn-keeper. He undertook to call up the man’s grandfather, and after some gesticulations and muttering unknown words, he whispered, ‘I feel the approaching spirit. Shall it appear?’ The man whom he was intending to benefit became alarmed, and begged to be allowed to hear the ghost speak, first of all. In a moment a deep, sepulchral voice pronounced the name of the grandfather. The man had had enough. He bolted from the place, leaving Iolo and his confederates triumphant.
“Iolo should have been content to leave it unproved that he was no poet. But he had not an easy life, and I suppose he had to have frills of some sort.
“Well, he walked home to Glamorgan. There he took a Glamorgan wife, Margaret Roberts of Marychurch, and he had to read less and work more to provide for a family. By the nature of his handiwork he was able to make more out of his verses than he would have done by printing better poetry. The vile doggerel which he inscribed on tombstones gained him a living and a sort of an immortality. He was one of the masons employed on the monument to the Man of Ross.
“Though a bad poet he was a Welsh bard. It was not the first or the last occasion on which the two parts were combined. Bard, for him, was a noble name. He was a ‘Christian Briton and Bard’—a ‘Bard according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of Britain’—and he never forgot the bardic triad, ‘Man, Liberty, and Light.’ Once, at the prison levee of a dissenting minister, he signed himself, ‘Bard of Liberty.’ To Southey, whom he helped with much out-of-the-way bardic mythology for his ‘Madoc,’ he was ‘Bard Williams.’