Welsh Journals

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tons of coke, iron and limestone in their heyday prior to the coming of the railways. In addition to splendid illustrations of the Glamorgan, Swansea, Neath, Aberdare and other canals, much detailed attention is paid to the canal boats, unique in their design in the British canal scene. Vivid photo- graphs of Sunday School outings along the south Wales canals at the turn of the century, with boats virtually capsizing from their load of irreverent children, suggest some of the less functional purposes to which these waterways could be put. The latest volume of the National Library of Wales Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 2 (Winter 1979) includes three important articles. Clare Taylor discusses 'Planter Attitudes to the American and French Revolution', basing her research in part on the Phillips MSS and other collections in the National Library of Wales. This article reveals, among other things, the Jamaican connections of the omnipresent Iolo Morganwg. G. J. Lewis provides a fine study of 'The Welsh borderland, 1750-1850', using the techniques of the geographer to examine this aspect of 'cultural transition'. W. Beynon Davies contributes an account of the career of Timothy Lewis (1877-1958), a leading Welsh scholar, while J. P. Jenkins prints two poems of the Glamorgan gentry community in the reign of James II; the annotations are interesting but the poems very bad. Finally, Gwynfryn Richards offers a substantial re-examination of the 'Diocese of Bangor during the rise of Welsh Methodism'. Much fascinating light is shed, inter alia, on the circulating schools. A third edition has been published of Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868-1922 (University of Wales Press, Cardiff), first published in 1963 and originally reviewed ante, Vol. 2, No. 1 (June 1964), pp. 102-4.