Welsh Journals

of Aphrodite Anadyomene found in Cyrene. She is the perfection of physical beauty, summing up and fixing for ever the pride and pleasure of the life of the senses; and if you should be ungrate- ful enough to find this beauty insufficient, you have but to pass on to that other room in the Terme where the Ludovisi throne, the work of an earlier and austerer age, is exhibited. Outside, in the sun-soaked court, the palms move gently in the breeze, the roses glow with colour; but here, in the shadowed alcove, the goddess, helped by attendant nymphs, strains upwards from the waters, while on one side a naked seated girl breathes on a double pipe, and opposite another, wrapped closely in clinging robes, holds in her left hand a burning lamp, and with her right, pours a libation. As I gazed and gazed at the THE ST. DAVID'S DAY INCIDENT AT CAERNARVON Sir,-On your remarks of the St. David s Day incident I should like to say a word. You treat the matter as a student rag and appear to be chiefly sorry that Welshmen in America and India may have been disturbed by the affair. Let me recall to your memory another student rag in a German city, hundreds of years ago, in the midst of which Martin Luther burned the Pope's Bull. ~uther's modern biographers do not deny that the act in itself was little more than a joke. The facts remain, that the Bull was burned and that the Union Jack was torn up. If the Pope, after the burning of his Bull, had had the good sense to realise that the youth of a German University sympathised with a plucky little Friar's protest against the intolerable abuses of the Indulgences, and had set the grievance right, the burning of the Bull would have been forgotten or remembered as a mere joke. But the Pope did not take warning. Simi- larly the fact that Welsh Students, merely in joke if you like, have treated the standard of the British Empire in a way that students in Eng- land and in many other parts of the British Empire would never, not even in the most hilarious moments, have so treated it, is a fact on which it may be well to ponder a little. It cannot be entirely explained away or laughed away.-Yours, etc., J. ARTHUR PRICE. London, April 5th, 1932. solemn and mysterious beauty of the figures I suddenly found myself saying "Yes, I am a pagan." For here, in this pagan art of early Greece, into which, in Pater's words, "the soul with all its maladies" had not yet passed^, in which, as I would rather say, soul and body were still one, flesh glorified by spirit, and spirit frankly accepting the flesh, I seemed to find a peace as deep and satisfying as any that rewards the ardours and agonies of saint and martyr. But the Ludovisi throne is as alien to the warm, sensual glow of the Roman streets as the self- torturings of a Martin Luther. Let us go back into the great court of the Terme, to the palms and the roses, and the brown-washed stucco, and the green lizards in the cloister. CORRESPONDENCE THE MAGISTRACY IN WALES Sir,­I have read the anonymous article, i he Truth about Welsh J.Ps." under the signature of "Demos" in your April issue, and I certainly think it requires some sort of reply. As a County Magistrate of over twenty-seven years' standing and also as a Borough Magis- trate of recent date, I disagree with most of "Demos's" criticism. Few people will deny that the former landed qualification for the county bench was an anachronism; but as it has been swept away by Lord Loreburn's Act of over a quarter of a century ago, no more need be said on this point. But what "Demos" demands-if I interpret his rather acid comments rightly-is a complete revolution, not only in the present personnel. of our magistracy but also in the pre- sent system of the administration of justice. He does admit-though grudgingly, I fancy-that practically every class of society is now repre- sented on the bench. He wants, however, to change all that in favour of a purely legal and professional régime,­not a very democratic notion, I consider. Nobody, so I gather, is fit to be appointed a Justice of the Peace unless he happens to be a lawyer. In other words, the human element on the bench is to be eradicated and the legal profession is to be installed in its stead. "Demos" speaks freely of the alleged discontent of "the working classes" with the existing system but my own impression, derived from long experience, is that the working classes will have every cause to lament the exchange -of