Welsh Journals

KILVERT MEMORIAL SERVICE. Sermon preached by THE Lord Bishop of SWANSEA AND Brecon at Clyro Parish Church on Sunday, 7th July. 194(i. Text He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith." ACTS xi, 24. WE are here at the bidding of the vicar to do honour to the memory of an old curate of this parish, Francis Kilvert. It is right that there should be some commemoration, now that peace has returned, of one who suddenly leapt into fame a little before the recent war. Nothing could more please Kilvert than to see this church of Clyro filled for the familiar service of the Church and this full assembly of people from far and near testifies to the rightness of our gathering in in this place. For though Kilvert, being of a loving and sunny nature, loved many places-his Wiltshire home, St. Harmon, Bredwardine-he loved none more than Clyro and his affection for it has brought it a new celebrity. ''Wordsworth used to say," he wrote in September 1870, that the Wye above Hay was the finest scenery in South Britain." A month later he was writing Oh the dear old mill kitchen Oh these kind hospitable houses about these kind hospitable hills. I believe I might walk about these hills all my life and never want a kindly welcome." And after a visit to these parts he wrote later on (12 vi 75) How pleasant once more to be among the kindly merry Builth market folk in the sunny afternoon home returning How different from England I believe I must have Welsh blood. I always feel so happy and natural and at home amongst the kindly Welsh." Kilvert deserves to be commemorated under three headings as a man of letters, as a recorder of a phase of social history, and as a clergyman. He has become a figure in our literature, long after his death, by the discovery that in his diaries he shews himself a natural prose-writer of a high order. Though he had read, and could talk, a good deal about English literature, he was not apparently a very precise scholar at least twice he uses well-known misquotations of famous places in Lycidas and in Peele Castle without any apparent misgiving. As a verse-writer it must be confessed that he is amateurish. In the matter of the ear, he does not seem to have any technical interest in music when he attends