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odd national costume for Welsh women by Lady Llanover. (Mendelssohn's harps came in too, probably a version of the Italian baroque harp.) These phenomena so resemble those of other cultural revivals of the period, a number of which led to strong and persistent movements for political independence, that one has to ask why the Welsh revival did no such thing. Dr. Morgan does not address the question directly; he mentions parallels such as that with the revival of Finnish culture at the hands of the Swedish-speaking gentry, but is in practice inclined to look at Wales in isolation. It is no doubt this that leads him to think it 'strange and unexpected' that Welsh culture should have differentiated itself from English just as Welsh society was approximating to the English or European norm, and to regret that, because of the slight impact on Wales of the French Revolution, 'patriotic feeling was forced into excessively cultural channels, and those far too antiquarian'. Leaving aside the question as to whether regret that things did not turn out otherwise is of much use to historical inquiry, much the same could be said of areas like Bohemia-Moravia or Greece, where past glories had to be not just rediscovered but in part remade. Dr. Morgan's particularism does not seriously detract from a lively study, full of curious information (much of it until now open only to Welsh speakers) interpreted with sharp good humour. But the book does suggest that, like other parts of Great Britain, Wales is historically and geographically lucky. If it escaped the conflicts that have usually followed self- differentiating cultural revivals, that was partly because its elites were well integrated into the British political and economic system, but also because what was Welsh could conveniently be identified with what was 'ancient British'. Welshness was, for the whole island, seen as aboriginal, the fountainhead; resentment did not go beyond harmless polemics against Hengist. That Wales today enjoys a distinctive language and culture with (to judge from the popular vote on devolution) only a modicum of strain suggests a rather higher valuation of the eighteenth- century revival than Dr. Morgan allows. JOHN ROSSELLI Sussex WITH HARP, FIDDLE AND FOLKTALE. By E. E. Roberts. Published by E. Roberts, 7 Glandulas Drive, Newtown; distributed by the Welsh Books Council, Aberystwyth, 1981. Pp. 160. £ 3.00. The author, a great grandson of the Gypsy harpist John Roberts (1816-94), published a Welsh version of this book, called John Roberts, Telynor Cymru, in 1978 and died in June 1981 while this book was in the press. It covers some of the same ground as Y Sipsiwn Cymreig recently published by Eldra and A. O. H. Jarman, and, like the Jarmans' book, it adds recently collected material and family tradition and memories to the older works on the Welsh Romany by such authorities as John Sampson, Dora Yates and Francis Hindes Groom; indeed, this book reprints the letters of John Roberts to Groom that were first published in The Welsh Outlook in 1933.