I Wished At
First To Persuade Him To Give Me Lessons In The Office, But Could
Not Succeed:
"No, no, lad;" said he, "catch me going in there:
I
would just as soon venture into a nest of porcupines." To
translate from books I had already, to a certain degree, taught
myself, and at his first visit I discovered, and he himself
acknowledged, that at book Welsh I was stronger than himself, but I
learnt Welsh pronunciation from him, and to discourse a little in
the Welsh tongue. "Had you much difficulty in acquiring the sound
of the ll?" I think I hear the reader inquire. None whatever: the
double l of the Welsh is by no means the terrible guttural which
English people generally suppose it to be, being in reality a
pretty liquid, exactly resembling in sound the Spanish ll, the
sound of which I had mastered before commencing Welsh, and which is
equivalent to the English lh; so being able to pronounce llano I
had of course no difficulty in pronouncing Lluyd, which by-the-bye
was the name of the groom.
I remember that I found the pronunciation of the Welsh far less
difficult than I had found the grammar, the most remarkable feature
of which is the mutation, under certain circumstances, of
particular consonants, when forming the initials of words. This
feature I had observed in the Irish, which I had then only learnt
by ear.
But to return to the groom. He was really a remarkable character,
and taught me two or three things besides Welsh pronunciation; and
to discourse a little in Cumraeg. He had been a soldier in his
youth, and had served under Moore and Wellington in the Peninsular
campaigns, and from him I learnt the details of many a bloody field
and bloodier storm, of the sufferings of poor British soldiers, and
the tyranny of haughty British officers; more especially of the two
commanders just mentioned, the first of whom he swore was shot by
his own soldiers, and the second more frequently shot at by British
than French. But it is not deemed a matter of good taste to write
about such low people as grooms, I shall therefore dismiss him with
no observation further than that after he had visited me on Sunday
afternoons for about a year he departed for his own country with
his wife, who was an Englishwoman, and his children, in consequence
of having been left a small freehold there by a distant relation,
and that I neither saw nor heard of him again.
But though I had lost my oral instructor I had still my silent
ones, namely, the Welsh books, and of these I made such use that
before the expiration of my clerkship I was able to read not only
Welsh prose, but, what was infinitely more difficult, Welsh poetry
in any of the four-and-twenty measures, and was well versed in the
compositions of various of the old Welsh bards, especially those of
Dafydd ab Gwilym, whom, since the time when I first became
acquainted with his works, I have always considered as the greatest
poetical genius that has appeared in Europe since the revival of
literature.
After this exordium I think I may proceed to narrate the journey of
myself and family into Wales. As perhaps, however, it will be
thought that, though I have said quite enough about myself and a
certain groom, I have not said quite enough about my wife and
daughter, I will add a little more about them. Of my wife I will
merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives - can make
puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of
business in Eastern Anglia - of my step-daughter - for such she is,
though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason, seeing
that she has always shown herself a daughter to me - that she has
all kinds of good qualities, and several accomplishments, knowing
something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the
Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar - not the
trumpery German thing so-called - but the real Spanish guitar.
CHAPTER II
The Starting - Peterborough Cathedral - Anglo-Saxon Names - Kaempe
Viser - Steam - Norman Barons - Chester Ale - Sion Tudor - Pretty
Welsh Tongue.
SO our little family, consisting of myself, my wife Mary, and my
daughter Henrietta, for daughter I shall persist in calling her,
started for Wales in the afternoon of the 27th July, 1854. We flew
through part of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire in a train which we left
at Ely, and getting into another, which did not fly quite so fast
as the one we had quieted, reached the Peterborough station at
about six o'clock of a delightful evening. We proceeded no farther
on our journey that day, in order that we might have an opportunity
of seeing the cathedral.
Sallying arm in arm from the Station Hotel, where we had determined
to take up our quarters for the night, we crossed a bridge over the
deep quiet Nen, on the southern bank of which stands the station,
and soon arrived at the cathedral - unfortunately we were too late
to procure admission into the interior, and had to content
ourselves with walking round it and surveying its outside.
It is named after, and occupies the site, or part of the site of an
immense monastery, founded by the Mercian King Peda, in the year
665, and destroyed by fire in the year 1116, which monastery,
though originally termed Medeshamsted, or the homestead on the
meads, was subsequently termed Peterborough, from the circumstance
of its having been reared by the old Saxon monarch for the love of
God and the honour of Saint Peter, as the Saxon Chronicle says, a
book which I went through carefully in my younger days, when I
studied Saxon, for, as I have already told the reader, I was in
those days a bit of a philologist.
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