Welsh Journals

sake," whined Simeon. "Pity, oh pity." Then getting; angry, he shouted, The paint, pay for the paint." The receding figure took no heed. A fierce anger got hold of Simeon. He struck his stick against the ground. He babbled, he shouted, he blasphemed, he swore. Suddenly he stooped to the ground, gathered a handful of dirt, and threw it at the gleaming white figure. Handful after handful he threw, but the padre never looked back. He disappeared through the doorway of the lonely house. Reviews. George III and the Constitution. By A. Mervyn Davies. 4s. 6d. net. Oxioid University Press. This is a Stanhope Prize Essay, and has considerable merits oi its own. its chief inerest to the general reader lies in the light that it throws on the sort oi historical ideas that nnd favour with Oxioid professors. Tinese ideas we must condemn as unscientihc and mis- leading. Young men are clearly taught to believe that in our age popular government has replaced aristocratic corruption, tne real truth being that aristocracy has been replaced by a plutocracy very feebly tempered by democracy. But while we are no believers in the false optimism which now corrupts Oxford teaching, we arc none the less pleased that a young Welshman should have trodden in the path of Sir Owen Edwards, who took three of these Uxlord historical essay prizes, and ot Llewelyn Williams, who proxime accessit to one. And the book is well written. The writer has a good style, and he has made considerable research. Cer- tainly he has turned out a volume which no one who wants to understand the constitutional history of the reign of George 111 can wisely neglect. But, as we have said, he sees the eighteenth century and our own age alike in a false perspective. We are not, he seems to say, as these sinners were. We have, he seems to think, exchanged a corrupt oligarchy for a free democracy in which the sovereign people are the true rulers. This belief makes him mistake in some wayis the problem of poor old Farmer George; it makes him quite misunderstand the England of Air. Lloyd George. Now let us 'point out to him in Mr. G. K. Chesterton's words the difference between the politics of our own, time and those of the time of Edmund Burke. "The Parliament" of Burke's days, says Chesterton, H hail faults enough, but 'it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. The Parliament was corrupt, as it is now, though the examples of corruption were then often made examples, in the sense of warnings, where they are new examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament was indifferent to the constituencies as it is now, though (perhaps the constituencies were less in- different to Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it did fulfil its duty by talking and trying to (talk well. It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great "talking shop," not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tips and official places." Nobody can doubt for a moment that many of the English aristocrats of the 18th century had a real enthusiasm for liberty; their voices lift like trumpets uipon the very word. Whatever their immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when they talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna iCharta" Here, we think, lay the first Dirty beast," shouted Simeon, feeling self- righteous all of a sudden. Dirty beast But the door had closed. Night. The thin rain falls on the body of Christ; the red paint sluices into gaping eyes, flows down and suffuses the pale mouth. From the spear wound under the slanting ribs the red drops splash to the knee, trickle down the shin, tremble on the toes, and fall, fall, fall in a steady drip the long night through. difficulty of George III. He was up against men who passionately believed in liberty. Fundamentally he was not opposed to the constitution as he understood it. indeed, 'as our author shows, he nearly always supported Parliament against the electorate. But aristocratic Republicans, like those with whom he came into opposi- tion, men for whom Cicero and Tacitus had said the last words in political philosophy, would not tolerate any king with powers greater than those of a Venetian Doge. And there was a second difficulty which Mr. Davies fails to appreciate. George 111 tried to model himself on the patriot king as drawn by Bulingbroke, but he never understood the model. The patriot king of Bolingbroke's dieam would have scorned corruption and would have, considered popular interests. And had George III been a man of genius like Edward I or Henry VIII, he would have broken and not employed corruption, and he would have stopped the exploitation of the poor by the industrial movement. Umfortumatedy for himself, George's head remains in history, as Mr. Chesterton \says, as the sign of a tavern," and 4 a "tavern that sold not English but German beer," and we may say, very bad German beer at that. The Eng- lish Court of the later 18th century was intellectually far behind the little Courts of the day that put Hamlet on the stage, and patronised Goethe and Schiller. George III -failed because the love of liberty of the classical type was strong in Parliament, and because he was too stupid to be a patriot king. A modern king who attempted to realise the ideal of Bolingbroke Would have the two advantages denied to George) that the love of liberty in the old classical sense has faded from the hearts 'of the governing classes, and that the new capitalist oligarchy, with their motor fleets, their party funds, and their kept press, is more hated by the people than even were the pocket boroughs of the older aris- tocracy. We should regret his success, for we still believe in democracy, but whether democracy is possible save in a «mall community is a problem that remains unsolved, and is one that Mr. Mervyn Davies will do well to realise J.A.P. Tro yn yr Eidal. 0. M. Edwards. (Cyfres Gwerin Cymru). Hughes and Son, Wrexham. 2s. 6d. The issue in this admirable little series, so well turned out by Messrs. Hughes and Son, of "Tro yn yr Eidal" as a fifth number, will bring back to many a memory of the exquisite pleasure they derived when the little book first came into their hands towards the end of 1888 or early in 1889. There was a charm about the outward appearance of that first edition (as there was about everything Sir Owen issued), but the style and matter were intoxicating. "O.M." wrote Welsh as per- fectly as Charles Laml wrote English, and the manner of both was much the same. The chief characteristics of Sir Owen's Welsh were (as of Lamb's English) clarity, simplicity, ease, a perfect sense of taste and fitness in the selection of word and illustration, and, above all, an utter absence of artificiality. He probably worked at some of his sentences and his paragraphs as diligently