ANCIENT HALF-TIMBERED HOUSES, FOREGATE STREET, CHESTER.
The view of the Dee from the southern point of Wynnestay Park is perhaps, as a whole, the most remarkable on the river. It is very perfect, and combines the unchangeable with the progressive, showing as it does the swelling hills on both sides of the water, fishermen with coracles on their backs, autumn tints on the clustering trees, and the regular arches of the great railway viaduct. When the train is absent these look not unlike those arches on the Campagna near Rome of which every artist has a sketch and every traveller a recollection. Opposite Wynnestay—which is in Denbighshire—is a detached bit of Flintshire hemmed in between Cheshire and Shropshire, in which is Bettisfield, a house of Lord Hanmer. Owen Glendower's wife was a Hanmer, and tradition says she was married in Hanmer church. The present owner evidently prefers his native river to the greater but not more historic ones of the Continent, and has recorded his preference in some lines, of which the following form the opening:
By the Elbe and through the Rheinland I've wandered far and wide,
And by the Save with silver tones, proud Danube's queenly bride;
By Arno's banks and Tiber's shore; but never did I see
A river I could match with thine, old Druid-haunted
Dee.
VIEW OF CHESTER, FROM THE COP.
Other houses on or near the river are Chirk Castle, dating just nine hundred years back, the family-place of the Myddletons (now Biddulphs), where among the old portraits is an authentic one of Oliver Cromwell; Brynkinalt, where much of the youth of Wellington was spent with his relation, Lord Arthur Hill Trevor, the owner; Plas Madoc, belonging to the famous member of Parliament for Peterborough, whose rise in the House is always heralded by a well-bred titter; and near Llangollen—for this enumeration carries us up the stream again—Plas Newydd, the house of the "Ladies of Llangollen." Farther up is Rhaggatt, the seat of a very old Welsh family, the Lloyds, and opposite it was the old hall of Owen Glendower, of which a Welsh bard says that it had "nine halls with large wardrobes" (probably the retainers' rooms), and near this "a wooden house supported on posts, with eight apartments for guests." Of the park, warren, pigeon-house, mill, orchard, vineyard and fishpond, "every convenience for good living and every support to hospitality," of which Pennant speaks, there is hardly a trace now, though the moat is a self-evident relic. Rug (pronounced Reeg) came from the Vaughans to the Wynns by many stages of attainder, marriage and sale, and is famous as the place where King Gryffydd ap Cynan was betrayed into the power of Lupus, earl of Chester, who kept him a prisoner for twelve years in the city castle; and near Bala Lake is Palé Hall, a new house representing a very old one; Rhiwlas (pronounced Rovlas), whose owners, the Prices, suffered in the Stuart cause, a member of the Long Parliament, one of their family, being expelled on account of his loyalty to the king; and Glann-y-llyn, a comfortable shooting-box of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. Of course there are numberless other houses, the mere list of which one could not get through without the help of a county history and a court guide for each of the shires through which the Dee passes. Every library stored in these old houses or carefully brought there from still older ones forms an inexhaustible subject of interest, not only to the owners (who are often the least benefited by it), but to inquiring minds of various races and conditions. Even a lad let loose from college, his mind full of athletics and Alpine Club aspirations, can find something to admire in the relics or representations of ancient national games, while the scholar discovers details full of interest in looking over the books, manuscripts and curiosities. The size of the country-houses and the extent of their gardens and parks seem perhaps disproportionate compared with the confined space of the country itself: indeed, it is as much their frequency in the landscape as the general cultivation of the whole that has made England celebrated for its garden-like look; but the historic associations of these small rivers and small territories are on an equally large scale. Thousands of unnamed brooks on this side of the ocean run through forests or farms as large as an English or Welsh county, without rousing any save imaginary associations in the mind of the traveller or the angler: they are as large as, and more varied in scenery than, our "wizard stream;" but the old recollections, the castles, the ruins, the modernized homes, the national relics, the inherited traits of likeness between past and present, are wanting. In Wales it is easy to leap back a few hundred years. The costume of the market-women at the seacoast town of Aberystwith—not a sluggish place, by any means—is almost literally like the old one in pictures of "Mother Hubbard." I have seen young and pretty women wear it. The neatly-roofed hay and straw stacks, so different from the ungainly heaps so called in England, are thatched in the same way for which the Welsh farmers were famous two hundred years ago, while many of the poorer dwellings, especially in the slate districts, look just as they may have done to Owen Glendower himself. The character of the people, like that of the grave Highlanders, is stern and enduring, though their temper is fierce and hot: it is easy to understand how passionately certain forms of Methodism appealed to such temperaments, and developed among them an enthusiasm easy to stir up into a likeness of that of the old Cameronians.