Welsh Journals

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ROWLAND WILLIAMS, D.D. By THE REV. J. ROLAND PRYCE, M.A. Among the famous men in Church or State whom Montgomery- shire claims as its sons, Rowland Williams of Meifod, a theologian and scholar of European reputation, deserves a prominent place in the records of the county. It is true that he cannot be described as a native of Montgomeryshire, having been born August 16th, 1817, at Halkyn in Flintshire; but soon after his birth his father was appointed Rector of Meifod and it was at Meifod that Rowland Williams spent the most impressionable years of his childhood and youth. I always," he wrote, consider Meifod more my birthplace than Halkyn." There it was that his love of nature was kindled and his boyish imagination received its earliest and most lasting impressions. Thus in his poem on Welsh Rivers," he sings of the Glaslyn's azure waters, of the gentle Wye, of Conway's roaring fall, but best of all, his memory goes back to the home of his youthful years: Thou wilt love in Vyrniew's pleasant vale On its woodland bank to linger-" His father, Rowland Williams, senr., a native of Dinas Mawddwy, was Rector of Meifod for seventeen years, from 1819 to 1836; he was a magistrate for the county of Montgomery; and was one of the most eminent of the Welsh clergy of his day. As a great Welsh scholar and writer he was chosen one of the four clergymen who, about the year 1840, were entrusted by the Welsh bishops with the task of revising the Welsh translation of the Prayer Book. Thus, through his father and his father's friends, Rowland Williams as a boy was brought up in an atmosphere of ardent Welsh patriotism. He was educated at Eton, of which he was a King's Scholar, and subsequently at King's College, Cambridge, where he won the Battye University Scholarship and was elected a fellow of his college. At college we hear of his presiding at the Welsh dinner given at Cambridge on St. David's