Welsh Journals

The poet informs the reader that death has carried away his lady-love. He then dis- courses on the inevitability of death and the futility of worldly living. What has happened to the great princes of the past, to Alexander, to Arthur, to Charlemagne, to Hannibal, as well as to such women as Semiramis, Hecuba, and Helen of Troy? Not one of them has escaped death. Hence the necessity for men and women to lead a good life, to give up their riches and their pleasures since these will be of no avail after death, for Satan will carry away the soul of the sinner if the angel of the Lord does not intervene to prevent it. Although the exact date of the composition of Le Miroir de Mort is unknown, it appears to have been written at the same time as the Oultre d' amours1, that is to say, about 1460. It is not an original work, Chastellain being inspired by such themes, popular during the fifteenth century, as the Dance of Death. The influence of Villon's Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis on the stanzas describing the fate of the famous women of the past can be discerned. The text of the poem in Peniarth MS. 482 is in ninety-two stanzas, each of eight octosyllabic lines, with the exception of stanza VII (fol. 187b) in which the fourth line is missing. The rhyming scheme is abaabbcc except in stanza LXIX (fol. 200b) where it is ababbccc. In the early printed version mentioned above as well as in that contained in the collected works of Georges Chastellain2 there are ninety-three stanzas, one more than in the Peniarth version. 3 The stanza missing in the Peniarth MS. should follow XXXIII (fol. 193a). On fol. 9 of Peniarth MS. 482 there is a miniature-see the plate facing page ooo-in which the author or translator of the Passional is shown presenting his book to a king of England. Mr. A. J. Herbert of the British Museum has identified this king as being Henry VII, thus placing the date of the manuscript at about the end of the fifteenth century. A note on Le Temple de Bocace, also by Georges Chastellain (see the fifteenth century N.L.W. MS. 5025, formerly Phillipps MSS. 15797 and 19709), will appear in a later number of this Journal. Armel H. DIVERRES. THE PARRY, LLANARMON, LIBRARY. On pp. 206-8 reference is made to the library, of over four thousand volumes, belonging to John Parry, of Llanarmon, which was purchased by Sir John Williams. The owner of this library was John, the eldest son of the Reverend Hugh Parry, of Llanarmon. He was born on July 24, 1835, in the farm-house of Banhadlen-Ucha, in the parish of Llanarmon-yn-Iâl, Denbighshire. He died on June 3, 1897, in his sixty-first year and was buried in Rhiw Iâl Cemetery, Llanarmon. John Parry is chiefly known as a trenchant speaker on disestablishment, land reform, and the tithe question. In the year 1886 he refused to pay tithe, and it is stated that he did not pay any tithe from that year until his death. He received little education. He attended, somewhat irregularly, a day school in Llanarmon for two years, and soon after reaching the age of fourteen he went to Llan- 1 Georges Chastellain, Oeuvres, publ. by Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1864), Vol. VI, p. 67. 2 Ibid, Vol. VI, p. 49. 3 Kervyn's edition is based on the Brussels MS., collated with Paris, Bibl. nat., fonds franc., 15216, and Paris, Arsenal, MS. 3521.