And though of not very difficult construction, the gentleman seemed wholly confounded, and unable to explain them; till Dr. Johnson, having picked out the meaning by little and little, said to the man, ‘Heb is a preposition, I believe, Sir, is it not?’ My countryman, recovering some spirits upon the sudden question, cried out, ‘So I humbly presume, Sir,’ very comically.”
About Bodvel they found the Methodist “prevalent,” which could not have been a pleasant circumstance to Johnson. With nonconformity the great Doctor had no sympathy. Boswell says that Johnson thought them “too sanguine in their accounts of their success among savages, and that much of what they tell is not to be believed. He owned that the Methodists had done good; had spread religious impressions among the vulgar part of mankind; but, he said, they had great bitterness against other Christians, and that he never could get a Methodist to explain in what he excelled others.”
This unhappy day they concluded suitably by going to Pwllheli, “a mean old town at the extremity of the country,” where they bought something by which to remember its meanness. Pwllheli is still mean, but in a different way, for it has become a noisy watering-resort from which the quiet traveller longs to escape at the first moment to quiet Abersoch or to Llanengan or Aberdaron, where “trippers” cease from troubling and tourists are at rest.
Nowadays, even the most breathless will grant Snowdon a few words of praise—praise for its lakes, awe for its rock-strewn valleys like the valley of the shadow of death. Of the two lakes, Llyn Beris and Llyn Padarn, which receive the waters on the northern slope of Snowdon, Johnson did not think much, for he complained that “the boat is always near one bank or the other.” As for Snowdon itself, the record is, “We climbed with great labour. I was breathless and harassed.” There is no word for all that is romantic or awe-inspiring, not an exclamation for the summit to which have mounted king, poet, priest, bard, wise men, through countless ages—only a record of Queenie’s goats, “one hundred and forty-nine, I think.” Mr. Thrale, Queenie’s father, was near-sighted and could not see the goats, so he had promised the child a penny for every one she showed him. Dr. Johnson, the devoted friend of Queenie, kept the account.
On their way back to the English border again, they passed through Bangor, where Johnson must have been happy in finding that “the quire is mean!” On August twenty-eighth they were once more with hospitable Mr. Myddleton. Here they stayed for over a week, and the journal contains, among other things, a long note about a Mr. Griffiths. The addition of the name of his estate or village fails to identify him now; looking for a Griffiths or a Jones in Wales, even a particular Jones or Griffiths, is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps the present limitation to a dozen patronymics is a blessing for courts of law, but it is baffling for the curious-minded man. The historian finds the old Welsh John ap Robert ap David ap Griffith ap Meredith ap David ap Vauchan ap Blethyn ap Griffith ap Meredith, and so on for a dozen more “aps,” easier for purposes of identification.
On their homeward way Johnson was enthusiastic about Wrexham and its “large and magnificent” church, one of the Seven Wonders of Wales. On the seventh of September they came to Chirk Castle, but I cannot find that they went into this residence, a place which undoubtedly would have delighted Johnson more on account of its “commodity of living” and solid grandeur than because one of its heiresses was the unamiable Warwick Dowager who had married Addison. They left for Shrewsbury after they had viewed the little waterfall of Pistyll Rhaiadr, where the Doctor remarked only upon its height and the copiousness of its fall. If Johnson had been an up-to-date Cambrian railway tourist, he could not have entered and left North Wales in more approved style, for he came in by way of Chester and left by way of Shrewsbury. Safely out of Wales they journeyed homeward through Worcester, probably Birmingham, and Oxford. On September twenty-fourth there is this simple record: “We went home.”
A VIEW OF DENBIGH CASTLE
From an engraving by Boydell, 1750