Welsh Journals

had no conception of those technical developments which are the subject of the con- cluding pages and it is highly improbable that they ever foresaw a national library with a staff of sixty and receiving from His Majesty's Treasury a grant-in-aid amount- ing to £ 34,000 towards its upkeep for one year. Such is the progress which the first forty years have witnessed. What the future has in store, what further developments will take place during the next forty years, we know not. One thing, however, is certain-that first and foremost the pioneers' main ideal will always be kept steadfastly in view-an institution established and maintained with a view to the general improvement of the intellectual and moral and aesthetic condition of the people of Wales and to granting them greater facilities and opportunities for education In accordance with the usual practice the present number of the Journal is accompanied by a Supplement On this occasion it takes the form of a Calendar, compiled by Mr. T. Jones Pierce, M.A., of sixteenth and seventeenth century letters and other documents in the Brogyntyn Collection which the Vice-President of the Library, the Right Hon. Lord Harlech, placed on deposit in the Library some years ago, and which, more recently, he generously converted into a gift. Lord Harlech is, and has been, a staunch advocate of closer co-operation between the University of Wales and the National Library of Wales in the matter of research and the publication of the fruits of research. A very welcome step towards that co-operation was taken by the Councils of the Library and the University College of Wales in 1945, when, upon the appointment of Mr. Jones Pierce as a Special Lecturer in the Department of Welsh History at the College, it was agreed that a proportion of his salary should be paid by the National Library, in return for which he would engage in part-time researches into original and unpublished historical records which are in the Library's possession or custody. This arrangement, then, could not have been more fittingly launched than by the calendaring, and editing for publication, of the correspondence of Lord Harlech's ancestors at Clenennau, Caernarvonshire, in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. These letters, supplementing as they do the Wynn of Gwydir papers, a Calendar of which was published by the Library in 1926, throw interesting sidelights upon political activities and economic and social life in the North Wales of the period. The Calendar of the Clenennau Letters and Papers, preceded by a valuable Introduction by Mr. Jones Pierce, makes a substantial volume which is sold at seven shillings and six pence. WILLIAM LL. DAVIES,