It
Is True That He Was Told That He Might Go To Llanfair, His Native
Place, And Officiate There At
A time when the curacy happened to be
vacant, and thither he went, glad at heart to get back amongst
His
old friends, who enthusiastically welcomed him; yet scarcely had he
been there three weeks when he received notice from the Chaplain of
the Bishop of Bangor that he must vacate Llanfair in order to make
room for a Mr John Ellis, a young clergyman of large independent
fortune, who was wishing for a curacy under the Bishop of Bangor,
Doctor Hutton - so poor Gronwy the eloquent, the learned, the meek,
was obliged to vacate the pulpit of his native place to make room
for the rich young clergyman, who wished to be within dining
distance of the palace of Bangor. Truly in this world the full
shall be crammed, and those who have little, shall have the little
which they have taken away from them. Unable to obtain employment
in Wales Gronwy sought for it in England, and after some time
procured the curacy of Oswestry in Shropshire, where he married a
respectable young woman, who eventually brought him two sons and a
daughter.
From Oswestry he went to Donnington near Shrewsbury, where under a
certain Scotchman named Douglas, who was an absentee, and who died
Bishop of Salisbury, he officiated as curate and master of a
grammar school for a stipend - always grudgingly and contumeliously
paid - of three-and-twenty pounds a year. From Donnington he
removed to Walton in Cheshire, where he lost his daughter who was
carried off by a fever. His next removal was to Northolt, a
pleasant village in the neighbourhood of London.
He held none of his curacies long, either losing them from the
caprice of his principals, or being compelled to resign them from
the parsimony which they practised towards him. In the year 1756
he was living in a garret in London vainly soliciting employment in
his sacred calling, and undergoing with his family the greatest
privations. At length his friend Lewis Morris, who had always
assisted him to the utmost of his ability, procured him the
mastership of a government school at New Brunswick in North America
with a salary of three hundred pounds a year. Thither he went with
his wife and family, and there he died sometime about the year
1780.
He was the last of the great poets of Cambria and, with the
exception of Ab Gwilym, the greatest which she has produced. His
poems which for a long time had circulated through Wales in
manuscript were first printed in the year 1819. They are composed
in the ancient Bardic measures, and were with one exception, namely
an elegy on the death of his benefactor Lewis Morris, which was
transmitted from the New World, written before he had attained the
age of thirty-five. All his pieces are excellent, but his
masterwork is decidedly the Cywydd y Farn or "Day of Judgment."
This poem which is generally considered by the Welsh as the
brightest ornament of their ancient language, was composed at
Donnington, a small hamlet in Shropshire on the north-west spur of
the Wrekin, at which place, as has been already said, Gronwy toiled
as schoolmaster and curate under Douglas the Scot, for a stipend of
three-and-twenty pounds a year.
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