With the angel as his guide he visits the City of Destruction, and its streets, Pride, Lucre, Pleasure. Then he soars to the City of Emmanuel.
The whole is allegorical and far-fetched, and absolutely intolerable to modern taste; but there was a time, and that not far distant, when allegory was much appreciated in Wales. In England also, Bishop Wilberforce, with his Agathos, and Munro, with his Dark River and other tales of like character, were the last of a school that has, happily, passed away for ever.
Ellis Wynne and his guide traverse the Well of Repentance and come to the Catholic Church, on the roof of which sit various princes brandishing their swords as her protectors.
Over the transept of the Church of England sits Queen Anne, holding the Sword of Justice in the left hand, and the Sword of the Spirit in the right. “Beneath the left sword lay the Statute Book of England, and beneath the other a big Bible. At her right hand I observed throngs clad in black—archbishops, bishops, and learned men upholding with her the Sword of the Spirit, whilst soldiers and officials, with a few lawyers, supported the other sword.”
He does not paint the Welsh Church as in a satisfactory condition in his day. The angel seats him in the rood-loft of one of them, “and we saw some persons whispering, some laughing, some staring at pretty women, others prying at their neighbours’ dress from top to toe, others showing their teeth at one another, others dozing, others assiduous at their devotion, but many of these latter dissimulating”; and he points out the irreverence and sacrilege caused by the law that required a man to be a communicant before he could receive office.
Ellis Wynne died in 1734, and is buried under the altar at Llanfair.
Mochras Spit, a grand field for finding shells, is the starting-point of the Sarn Badrig, a reef that runs for something like twenty miles into the Cardigan Bay, and is about four yards wide. At ebb tide about nine miles are exposed, but the foam about the rest can be traced far out to sea. Traditionally it was one of the embankments that enclosed the Cantref y Gwaelod, the low-lying hundred, well peopled, that contained twelve fortified towns, but which was submerged in the fifth century through the folly of the drunken Seithenin, who neglected to keep up the sea-wall. The story has been told already.
A short poem attributed to Gwyddno, whose territory was overwhelmed, has been preserved, in which he laments:—
“Stand forth, Seithenyn, and behold the dwelling of heroes, the plain of Gwyddno is whelmed in the sea,