Welsh Journals

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are reproduced without any indication as to where the originals can be seen. Cliches are fortunately few; but not many historians would now accept the myth of 'Puritan joylessness' (p. 112) or hear 'rumblings of the Civil War' as early as January 1640 (p. 117). The foundation of the Royal Society is misdated (p. 210), and William III is referred to inappropriately as 'a Dutch king' (p. 297). Familiar passages from Dryden and from the Bible are misquoted (pp. 221, 235). When he sat to Lely for the portrait reproduced on p. 254 of this book, Cromwell is said to have asked the artist 'to paint my picture truly. remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me'. And it has to be admitted that the Cambridge Guide has some roughnesses and warts of its own. Despite these, however, the collection remains informative, stimulating and, for the most part, readable. If it does not replace earlier surveys, it deserves a place alongside them. HUGH DUNTHORNE Swansea A DISCOURSE ON THE LOVE OF OUR COUNTRY. By Richard Price. Translated into Welsh by P. A. L. Jones, with a facsimile of the original. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1990. Pp. 175. £ 4.95. Richard Price's A Discourse upon the Love of our Country is important in many ways, not least because of the responses which it provoked. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was one such response. Even Burke, who was scathing in his denunciation of the main political themes of the discourse, acknowledged that it contained 'some good moral and religious sentiments, and not ill expressed, The discourse was a rhetorical masterpiece and it is surprising that this excellent translation into Welsh should be the first published Welsh translation of Price's famous classic. The introduction by P. A. L. Jones is informative and lucid. A great deal of knowledge and familiarity with the subject has been compressed expertly into an essay. The annotations belong to Dr. D. O. Thomas and whet our appetite for his forthcoming edition of Price's political pamphlets. Mr. Jones's work is self-limiting. The introduction presumes that Richard Price was a Welsh eighteenth-century radical and the act of translation into Welsh begs the question of how significant Price's radicalism was in a Welsh context. Gwyn A. Williams has questioned the curious assumption of several Welsh historians that writers of international repute like Price had no effect on their homeland because they wrote in English and in London. Price exerted an influence within his Glamorganshire family, and Morgan John Rhys published Price in the United States. However, it would seem that Price, unlike Paine and Priestley, lacked popularizers in the new Welsh-language political journals which burgeoned for a short period during the 1790s. Mr. Jones observes that Price's patriotism had political terms of reference, in contrast to the linguistic and cultural