Welsh Journals

game of croquet in the dark'. The lower classes find exhilaration in Mrs. Preece's sale that lasts from 3 to 10 p.m. 'The things I believe sold well. The village was all alive, buzzing and excited by the sale far into the night.' Next day they were less happy about their trophies. The diarist missed little. The young fox he saw 'was a pretty, merry, good-tempered little beast with great quaint-looking ears and black legs and pads, very full of fun'. Kilvert's own sense of humour was provoked by the ride he was offered in Mr. Allen's 'most antiquated, most comfortable old yellow chariot'. Four passengers sat inside but Kilvert preferred the rumble or luggage-carrier and was content with the 'night air and the company of the footman'. At the station he was appalled by the sight of a man whose face had apparently been disfigured. 'Not a feature was visible. He looked strange, horrible, unearthly.half like a snouted beast'. In its range of interest, this is a splendid volume and we have every cause to be grateful to Dafydd Ifans for his labours. CECIL PRICE Swansea JUDGE BRYN ROBERTS. A biography. By Jack Eaton. University of Wales Press, Cardiff. 1989. Pp. 142. £ 12.95. The first part of this interesting study focusses on John Bryn Roberts's career as the Liberal M.P. for the Eifion constituency in Caernarfonshire between 1885 and 1906. In the opening chapters, the author examines his background and upbringing as the eldest son of a relatively well-off and enterprising farmer who lived at Bryn Adda, near Bangor. In addition, he analyses the religious and class interests which conditioned the political and party loyalties of the Gwynedd middle classes during the mid-Victorian period when they were coming increasingly aware of their responsibilities as social and political leaders. During his youth and subsequent career as a country solicitor, whose practice was based on Bangor and Llangefni, Roberts readily absorbed the prevalent values of his own social group and became committed to what he perceived as the immutable basis of Liberalism-free trade, peace, retrenchment and reform. It was on such a programme that he was elected as Liberal M.P. in 1885. But during the next twenty-one years, when the pattern of Welsh political activity and party loyalties changed in response to the emergence of new social pressures and the widening of a severely restricted franchise, his rigid adherence to Gladstonian orthodoxies ensured not only that he disagreed with his radical colleagues at Westminster but also that his own contribution to political life was negligible. Unlike the former, he was opposed to the anti-tithe agitation and totally insensitive to demands for home-rule, while his attitudes to social reform and industrial relations reflected his mid-Victorian upbringing and his strong belief in individualist principles Despite his support for Church disestablishment and his opposition to the Boer War,