“What a fearful fall,” exclaimed Mr Stodham, who may himself have been a Bard of Liberty.
“But his business, apart from his trade, was antiquities, and especially the quest of them up and down Wales.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr Stodham, “if the old man hoped for some grand result from meddling with those mysterious old books and papers—perhaps nothing definite, health, wealth, wisdom, beauty, everlasting life, or the philosopher’s stone,—but some old secret of Bardism or Druidism, which would glorify Wales, or Cowbridge, or Old Iolo himself.”
“Very likely. He was to a scientific antiquary what a witch is to an alchemist, and many a witch got a reputation with less to her credit than he had.
“As a boy he remembered hearing an old shoemaker of Llanmaes (near Lantwit) speak of the shaft of an ancient cross, in Lantwit churchyard, falling into a grave that had been dug too near it for Will the Giant of Lantwit. As a middle-aged man he dug up the stone. It was less love of antiquity than of mystery, buried treasure, and the like. He was unweariable in his search for the remains of Ancient British literature. At the age of seventy, when the Bishop of St David’s had mislaid some of his manuscripts and they had thus been sold, Iolo walked over Caermarthenshire, Pembrokeshire, and Cardiganshire, and recovered the greater part. He took a pony with him as far as Caermarthen, but would not allow it to carry his wallets until at last it was arranged that his son should walk on one side and himself on the other, which made him remark that ‘nothing was more fatiguing than a horse.’ The horse appears in a triad of his own composition:
“There are three things I do not want. A Horse, for I have a good pair of legs: a Cellar, for I drink no beer: a Purse, for I have no money.
“He would not ride in Lord Dunraven’s carriage, but preferred to walk. That he did not dislike the animal personally is pretty clear. For at one time he kept a horse which followed him, of its own free will, upon his walks.
“Iolo was a sight worth seeing on the highways and byways of Glamorgan, and once had the honour of being taken for a conjuror. His biographer—a man named Elijah Waring, who was proud to have once carried his wallets—describes him ‘wearing his long grey hair flowing over his high coat collar, which, by constant antagonism, had pushed up his hat-brim into a quaint angle of elevation behind. His countenance was marked by a combination of quiet intelligence and quick sensitiveness; the features regular, the lines deep, and the grey eye benevolent but highly excitable. He was clad, when he went to see a bishop, in a new coat fit for an admiral, with gilt buttons and buff waistcoat, but, as a rule, in rustic garb: the coat blue, with goodly brass buttons, and the nether integuments, good homely corduroy. He wore buckles in his shoes, and a pair of remarkably stout well-set legs were vouchers for the great peripatetic powers he was well known to possess. A pair of canvas wallets were slung over his shoulders, one depending in front, the other behind. These contained a change of linen, and a few books and papers connected with his favourite pursuits. He generally read as he walked....’”
“Tut, tut,” remarked Mr Stodham, “that spoils all.”
“He generally read as he walked, ‘with spectacles on nose,’ and a pencil in his hand, serving him to make notes as they suggested themselves. Yet he found time also, Mr Stodham, to sow the tea-plant on the hills of Glamorgan. ‘A tall staff which he grasped at about the level of his ear completed his equipment; and he was accustomed to assign as a reason for this mode of using it, that it tended to expand the pectoral muscles, and thus, in some degree, relieve a pulmonary malady inherent in his constitution.’