Welsh Journals

stands for in these twentieth century days were amongst the mental accomplishments promoted in the sixth century by Prince Maelgwyn. There is reason to believe that the first congress of bards and musicians, or national gathering or bardic festival, on something like the same lines as our present day Eisteddfod, was held in Maelgwyn's festive hall at Deganwy. When Maelgwyn's days were over, and other Chiefs and Princes held sway over his old domains, the traditional cultural exercises of former days still persisted from century to century. And probably no prince of the Middle Ages did more to foster the art of poetry and minstrelsy than Ednyfed Fychan, the famous Prime Minister and Chancellor of Llewelyn the Great, who lived at Llys Euryn. And then came the Tudors, with their pride of Cymric ancestry. On the foundations of a ruined palace a more stately structure sprang than of old in the Creuddyn Peninsula, and for generations the new Gloddaeth did as much to mould the Welsh national character as any noble house in Gwynedd. The strains of Cymric song and melodies echoed among its rafters, the family bard flourished, and native customs and crafts which had survived the changes of centuries continued to be observed on its hearth. Then came the days of Thomas and Roger Mostyn who made of the Library at Gloddaeth a storehouse of some of the finest and rarest examples of Welsh MSS. in existence, and a collection of ancient poetry that was the envy of every practised collector in the land. The country seems full of very splendid houses," said Samuel Johnson when he travelled through Denbighshire and other parts of North Wales with Mrs. Thrale in the eighteenth century. Had the old Doctor passed the same way a hundred and more years earlier he would still have been attracted by the splendour of many of its country houses for since the spacious days of the Tudors some new mansion or other seemed to raise its gracious head continuously on the timbered slopes of the country-many of them the homes of distinguished men, descended from branches of the Fifteen Royal Tribes of Gwynedd. The influence of these noble houses on the Welsh national character was unmistakable. Nowhere in the whole length and breadth of the country could more gifted and cultured men be found than among the gentry of the Vale of Clwyd, the Vale of Conway and the Hills of Hiræthog. In every field of intellectual pursuit, as poets, as minstrels, as historians, as lithographers, as antiquarians, as genealogists, they stood out amongst the county families of their time. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at least eighteen of these patricians were independent of a Bardd teulu