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much loved and honoured bv those who knew him. David Williams was, if anybody ever was, "a man's man" and in all kinds of quarters- among saints and sinners, the learned and the unlearned alike-there were those who owed much to him and who will cherish his memory with abiding affection. In a remarkable way he came verv near to men and to their problems, and his work as a professor among students or as a chaplain among troops or as a friend among those who knew him best proved how deep was his love for t, fellows and how genuine his desire to serve them. His jov in life, the sanity of his outlook, the downright honesty of his nature and the genuineness of his faith in men and in their Maker-all these qualities and others as well leap to the mind as one recalls him now nor can one forget those closing months of increasing pain and his victory over it, as he Welsh Pageants and Pageants By Alfred Perceval Graves, LittD. IF you open the Oxford Dictionary to discover the derivation of the word pageant," you will get little help. The etymology is described as dubious, perhaps from pagina (a page), a very unsatisfactory result. Then turn to Dr. Joseph Wright's famous Dialect Dictionary, and you are carried off upon a strange scent, for under the word padjantree," also written pageantry," we read (1) padgantree," to be near death (2) to sing padgantree," to warble the death note. Now we Harlech pageanters do not for a moment believe that we are near death," and so obliged, like dying swans, to warble our death note." So we look further afield and think we have found, the derivation of the word pageant in this description of the pageants played at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th century:- The manner of these plays was thus: Every company had his pageant, which pageants were a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they played, being all open at the top, that all beholders might hear and see them. The places where they played them was in every street. They began first at the Abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played, it was wheeled to the High Cross before the Mayor, and so to every street, and so every street--had a pageant playing before them at one time till all the pageants appointed for the day were played; and when one pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so they might come in place thereof, exceeding orderly, and all the streets have their pageants afore them all at one time playing together; to see which plays was great resort, and also scaffolds and stages made in the streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants." A very pleasant description in old world, if not very precise, English. The word pageant here applies generally to the travelling stage on knew more and more what it was to "suffer with men and like a man be strong." It is the reality and essential goodness of his life, the genuineness and healthy-mindness of his piety that explain the hold which his virile and lovable personality had on men. It could not be better expressed than in words which we venture to quote and translate from his first book: "It is not the lesson nor the counsel nor the sermon, in themselves, which helps men to believe but something behind these-that hid- den mysterious quality in the man nimstlf which springs directly from his own personal experience of God, transforming him and every counsel and sermon of his into living sacra- ments and channels by means of which the same experience of God is brought to others." Therein lay the secret of the charm and of the influence of David Williams upon men. four wheels, and also to the various episodes in the morality or miracle plays acted on special festival days. The acting naturally began before the representatives of the church, the abbot and abbess, and monks and nuns, and then was continued before the mayor, the local repre- sentative of the State, at the Market Cross, and then passed on street by street for the delectation of the citizens. The religious element has passed from the travelling shows of our time, though some of them, such as the Punch and Judy puppet show, are reminiscent of the past. But the modern pageants that have replaced them, in order to embody the past faithfully, present religious figures with faithful care. Indeed, not long since there was a great Church of England pageant, and there has been talk of a Welsh Church pageant, in aid of the Million Pound Church Aid Fund, in Carnarvon and Cardiff Castles. Cardiff led the way in pageantry under the aegis of Lord Howard de Walden, who had dis- covered in Captain Owen Vaughan, better known as Owen Rhoscomyl, author of The Flame- bearers of Wales," a genius capable of making the Welsh past live again. This Cardiff pageant of 1909 drew together the descendants of many of the Welsh princes and peers in a series of episodes, one of which depicting the end of Llewellyn the Great was written and acted with astonishing pathos and power. But Cardiff Castle and its surroundings-and the same will hold good of the forthcoming pageant at Conway in memory of the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the Menai Bridge-lent itself to the deploying of large bodies of actors and wider effects than are pos- sible at Harlech. There, while we do not propose to cart the castle about the country on wheels as in a pageant of the good old days, or to have minia-