Leaving Llewenni on August eighteenth, they started definitely forward on their journey. They passed through Abergele, “a mean little town,” to Bangor, where they found “a very mean inn.” Certainly meanness is accumulating in Wales! Johnson had the instinctive contempt for things Welsh which so many English people hold. But, after finding Lord Bulkely’s house at Bangor also “very mean,” this is the point in the great Doctor’s journal where the lover of Wales may take heart.
There was one contrivance of the hand and mind of man which impressed Dr. Johnson tremendously. Where such works of the Creator as Snowdon, for example, failed, where the mystery of this land of legend passed him by, castles succeeded by virtue of their size, the strength of their walls, the completeness of their equipment. In Denbigh, Johnson had eagerly tried to trace the lines of that “prodigious pile” of a castle. So much of the comment we get in this neglected Welsh journal and in Johnson’s other writings seems to summarize itself in two words: size and power. He told Mrs. Piozzi to get a book on gardening, since she would stay in the country, feed the chickens, and starve her intellect, “and learn,” he said, “to raise the largest turnips, and to breed the biggest fowls.” It was in vain that Mrs. Piozzi told him that the goodness of these dishes did not depend upon their size.
From Beaumaris Castle to Carnarvon there is a crescendo of praise, ending in the memorable words about Carnarvon: “To survey this place would take much time. I did not think there had been such buildings; it surpassed my ideas.” Of Beaumaris, Johnson wrote: “The Castle is a mighty pile.… This Castle corresponds with all the representatives of romancing narratives. Here is not wanting the private passage, the dark cavity, the deep dungeon, or the lofty tower. We did not discover the well. This is the most compleat view that I have yet had of an old Castle.” And then came four last delighted words, “It had a moat.”
Nor was the next day, August twentieth, less of a success. After meeting with some friends they went to see the castle in Carnarvon, which Johnson describes as “an edifice of stupendous magnitude and strength; it has in it all that we observed at Beaumaris, and much greater dimensions, many of the smaller rooms floored with stone are entire; of the larger rooms, the beams and planks are all left; this is the state of all buildings left to time. We mounted the Eagle Tower by one hundred and sixty-nine steps, each of ten inches. We did not find the well; nor did I trace the moat; but moats there were, I believe, to all castles on the plain, which not only hindered access, but prevented mines. We saw but a very small part of the mighty ruin, and in all these old buildings, the subterraneous works are concealed by the rubbish.”
When Johnson and the Thrales were on their way from Llewenni to Bangor, they passed through Conway. The Doctor was much exercised in Conway because of the plight of an Irish gentlewoman and her young family who could get no beds to sleep in, but the one feature in this rare old town which might have impressed him, its castle, he did not notice in the journal. Built by the same architect who planned Carnarvon, it has much of its grace and is in some respects even more beautifully placed. With its machicolated towers, its vast banqueting-hall, Queen Eleanor’s oratory, and the river washing at its foundations, it is still a wonderful old pile. On the return trip Johnson makes a short, practical note to the effect that the castle afforded them nothing new, and that if it was larger than that of Beaumaris, it was smaller than that of Carnarvon. Carnarvon was the largest, and the Doctor was not to be weaned from it any more than from the idea that Mrs. Thrale ought to raise the largest turnips.
The day following this memorable inspection of Carnarvon Castle, they dined with Sir Thomas Wynne and his Lady. Johnson’s comment was brief,—“the dinner mean, Sir Thomas civil, his Lady nothing.” It would seem that Lady Wynne failed to recognize the greatness of her visitor, and, accustomed to a distinguished reception, the great man’s vanity was hurt. Afterwards he made remarks about Sir Thomas’s Lady, in which she was compared to “sour small beer” and “run tea.” Of a lady in Scotland he had said “that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive she would sting.”
This mean dinner and, we presume, its meaner hostess were but a sorry prelude to a melancholy journey which the party had to take to Mrs. Thrale’s old home at Bodvel. They found nothing there as in Mrs. Thrale’s childhood; the walk was cut down, the pond was dry. The near-by churches which Mrs. Thrale held by impropriation Johnson thought “mean and neglected to a degree scarcely imaginable. They have no pavement, and the earth is full of holes. The seats are rude benches; the altars have no rails. One of them has a breach in the roof. On the desk, I think, of each lay a folio Welsh Bible of the black letter, which the curate cannot easily read.” Over one hundred and thirty years later it was that I made the tour, which I have described for you, of these Welsh churches of early foundation. Mysterious, desolate, dilapidated old places they are; in comparison with the ugly, comfortable nonconformist chapels, spectacles for the prosperous to jeer at.
Mrs. Piozzi tells a story which shows that the great Doctor brought terror to the hearts of the Welsh parsons. “It was impossible not to laugh at the patience Dr. Johnson showed, when a Welsh parson of mean abilities, though a good heart, struck with reverence at the sight of Dr. Johnson, whom he had heard of as the greatest man living, could not find any words to answer his enquiries concerning a motto around somebody’s arms which adorned a tombstone in Ruabon Churchyard. If I remember right, the words were,—
Heb Dw, Heb Dym (Without God, without all)
Dw o’ diggon (God is all sufficient).[1]