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.
CHAPTER XXXI
Start for Anglesey - The Post-Master - Asking Questions - Mynydd
Lydiart - Mr Pritchard - Way to Llanfair.
WHEN I started from Bangor, to visit the birth-place of Gronwy
Owen, I by no means saw my way clearly before me. I knew that he
was born in Anglesey in a parish called Llanfair Mathafarn eithaf,
that is St Mary's of farther Mathafarn - but as to where this
Mathafarn lay, north or south, near or far, I knew positively
nothing. Passing through the northern suburb of Bangor I saw a
small house in front of which was written "post-office" in white
letters; before this house underneath a shrub in a little garden
sat an old man reading.
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