Welsh Journals

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success. The Achilles heel of any dynasty, small or great, must always be that there is no guarantee that a gifted father can transmit his own quality of body, mind, or spirit to his sons. But that there was very considerable latent potentiality to be transmitted in those Mansel genes was later to be evinced in the career of Rice's grandson, the Admiral Robert, fourth son of Edward Mansel.1 Here was vigour, enterprise, imagination, talent, and daring to spare. Had some quirk of fate decreed that he, and not his less effectual father, had directly succeeded the great Sir Rice, the Mansel story in Elizabethan and Stuart times might have been altogether more remarkable than it was. 1 D.N.B., D.W.B., son.