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did his contemporaries, with his gaiety, his recklessness (his sheer brink- manship where debts were concerned), his intelligence, his vitality, his capacity for inspiring loyalty and friendship. The tensions to which he was subject are well brought out in this book. Indeed the whole portrait Miss Beazley draws of Madocks and his milieu is a very convincing one. She has, too, some new and interesting things to say about his last years and about the legend which grew up around his name after his death. But the best part of this book-as might be expected from the author of Designed to Live In-is reserved for the description of the various archi- tectural and planning schemes in which Madocks was involved. The chapter on the planning and growth of Tremadoc is particularly good. Technical jargon is mercifully kept to a minimum throughout, but in the section dealing with the great embankment itself, the chronology of events is not as clear as it could be at times. Objections might justifiably be made against the inadequacy of the short introductory chapter on the eighteenth- century Welsh background and against the inclusion of a largely irrelevant and superficial chapter on Parliamentary Reform, but these and other minor short-comings do not detract from the main value of the book. To celebrate the completion of the great work on the embankment in 1811, Madocks characteristically decided to hold an 'Eisteddfod' as well as 'Races', 'Plays, Balls, etc. Miss Beazley is by no means unaware that another world exists side by side with the one she has so skilfully recreated. If it is Madocks, of Welsh ancestry but of English upbringing, who dominates the pages of this book, another hero is to be discovered between the lines. As the latter part of the sub-title suggests, Miss Beazley came to recognize the invaluable part played by Madocks's agent John Williams in carrying out the schemes devised by Madocks. How was it that an obscure farmer's son from Anglesey, without any professional training, was able to translate into practice Madocks's extravagant ideas? Much less is known about John Williams than Madocks. Materials for a 'Life' are almost non-existent but no attempt has been made here to investigate the strange, shadowy world which produced him. It will no longer do to dismiss flesh-and-blood Welshmen as 'independent poetic Celts' or rely on vague notions about racial 'differences in temperament' to account for the success of John Williams. Only an examination in depth of native Welsh society (and not one grafted on to it) will provide the answer to that. KEITH WILLIAMS-JONES Bangor LEAD MINING IN WALES. By W. J. Lewis, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1967. Pp. 415. 50s.