Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Varieties in Prose, Vol. 2
It was a comfort to find that the people at the inn spoke English intelligibly, though with a strong foreign accent, and there were several English tourists in the dining-room, with one Of whom, a mild old gentleman, I had some pleasant conversation. After dinner we were agreeably surprised with music, the old airs of the country performed on an extremely ancient sort of stringed instrument, which was no other than a harp; nor in fact were we otherwhere than in the land of Gwynedd in Kymru, named by the Saxons or English North Wales.' Wales, to this day of the nineteenth century, is notably unlike England. Undivided now from the larger and more fertile part of the island by any Offa's Dyke, river, line of castles, or other visible march, its shir'es geographically and legally a piece of England, the people here have thoughts, habits, ways of life of their own, and a language of their own, not only generally spoken and written, preached and sung, but taking the shape of books, magazines and newspapers, produced and accepted on the ordinary principles of supply and demand; which language (of course with many modifi cations and accretions) is no other at basis than that which ancient Britain spoke before the Teuton tribes who gave name and shape to 'england' were ever heard of in the island.
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