Welsh Journals

Dr. Morgan's Bible, as the first Welsh version will ever be called, was issued complete in one octavo volume, consisting of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, but only five hundred copies were printed. It is a matter of common history that, in 1562-3, Parliament had ordered that the whole of the Old Testament, as well as the New, together with the Apocrypha and the Book of Common Prayer, be translated into Welsh under the direction of the four Welsh Bishops and the English Bishop of Hereford, and that it was to be published on the 1st of March, 1566, failing which the said Bishops were each to( be mulcted in a fine Jqf £ 40. Whether these fines were ever imposed or not does not seem clear. In any event, it will be observed that this enactment in the fifth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth was not complied with for another quarter of a century. Why this delay? First, it is alleged, from the difficulty of finding persons sufficiently learned, and in other respects qualified, to undertake so important and responsible a task; and, secondly, because the English Government were anxious for the final extinction of the Welsh as a spoken language. It is, indeed, generally believed that the trans- lation was only sanctioned at all in the hope that it would afford greater facility for the natives of the Principality to acquire a know- ledge of the English language, and thus ulti- mately adopt it in preference to their own tongue. If this surmise be correct, a more egregious mistake was never committed for nothing in the history of the Welsh people has so effectually contributed, not only to perpetuate the two slightly differing dialects of the North and the South, but to purify them of colloquialisms and archaic expressions, thus happily fusing them together into one and the same language, having the Bible as the common standard and collingual classic. Without doubt the Welsh as a spoken language owes its perpetuation largely to the Welsh Bible. It is the one Book wherein lies the secret of that wondrous revival of this ancient tongue which has restored to it much of its pristine beauty of early Bardic times, lost during the dark days of Mediævalism. and has elevated it to the honourable place which it now holds among the literary languages of the world. It may be gathered from what has been said, that long before the publication of the first com- plete Welsh Bible in 1588, the renowned William DAWN-IN THE VALE OF CLWYD. The grey dawn wakes, and with her misty robes Trailing behind her, steals across Heaven's floor, And birds, from slumber roused, by her approach, Are piping forth in joy that night is o'er The sky alternate flushes and then pales, In consciousness of splendour soon to come. Salesbury had been. diligently engaged in trans- lating parts, of the New Testament. These, how- ever, were mainly from the Latin. In the year 1551, nearly forty years before the appearance of the Welsh Bible as a whole, Salesbury had published a little book entitled Kynniver Llith a Ban," consisting of the Epistles," i.e., the extracts from them found in the Book of "Com- mon Prayer. Even five years prior to that, namely in 1546, portions of Scripture had ap- peared in Welsh, in particular the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and some verses from the Epistles by Sir Edmund Prys. It is there- fore clear that Salesburv was engaged in trans- lating portions of the New Testament before the year 1551. and that he completed and published the Welsh New Testament for the first time in 1567. Between 1588 and 1799 there were seventeen important editions of the Welsh. Bible issued, besides a large number of minor ones. Of these some were, to a certain extent, new or emended translations, and accompanied by numerous commentaries. The following are historic:- That of 1620, edited bv Rev. Robert Parry; the 1648 edition, containing the metrical Psalms of the learned Archdeacon Prys; the 1718, edited and annotated by Rev. Moses Williams, of which ten thousand copies were printed, this being the first Welsh Bible issued under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Know- ledge, the forerunner of the British and Foreign Bible Society; and Rev. Peter Williams's great Bible of 1770. still regarded by most Welshmen as the Commentary par excellence, of which many millions have been published from time to time in various sizes and bindings. At Cardiff, in 1904. there was held a unique exhibition of Welsh Bibles, in which were shown examples of almost every edition of the sacred volume published in that language between 1567, when Salesbury's New Testament Was first issued. and the year 1900. The basis of them all, however, is the Welsh Bible of Dr. Morgan, to whose piety and learning and industry the incomparable version to be found to-day in every Welsh chapel, church, and home through- out the world. is a grand and perpetual testi- mony, and will ever remain a monument of the simplicity, dignity, grace, and melodious beauty of the language of the ancient Britons. An hour or two of silent, brooding calm, While in the east the light just throbs and flames, And then from fields adjacent larks arise, And greet, harmoniously, the new-born day; The rabbits scurry off with ears alert, To breakfast in the coppice just ahead, And zephyrs ripple o'er'the clover field, Until it seems a gleaming, sapphire lake. MARGARET PIERCE.