Sunday Night—Sleep, Sin, and Old Age—The Dream—Lanikin Figure—A Literary
Purchase.
The Sunday morning was a gloomy one. I attended service at church with
my family. The service was in English, and the younger Mr. E— preached.
The text I have forgotten, but I remember perfectly well that the sermon
was scriptural and elegant. When we came out the rain was falling in
torrents. Neither I nor my family went to church in the afternoon. I,
however, attended the evening service, which is always in Welsh. The
elder Mr. E— preached. Text, 2 Cor. x. 5. The sermon was an admirable
one, admonitory, pathetic and highly eloquent; I went home very much
edified, and edified my wife and Henrietta, by repeating to them in
English the greater part of the discourse which I had been listening to
in Welsh. After supper, in which I did not join, for I never take
supper, provided I have taken dinner, they went to bed, whilst I remained
seated before the fire, with my back near the table, and my eyes fixed
upon the embers, which were rapidly expiring, and in this posture sleep
surprised me. Amongst the proverbial sayings of the Welsh, which are
chiefly preserved in the shape of triads, is the following one: “Three
things come unawares upon a man—sleep, sin, and old age.” This saying
holds sometimes good with respect to sleep and old age, but never with
respect to sin. Sin does not come unawares upon a man; God is just, and
would never punish a man as He always does for being overcome by sin, if
sin were able to take him unawares; and neither sleep nor old age always
come unawares upon a man. People frequently feel themselves going to
sleep, and feel old age stealing upon them; though there can be no doubt
that sleep and old age sometimes come unawares—old age came unawares upon
me; it was only the other day that I was aware that I was old, though I
had long been old, and sleep came unawares upon me in that chair in which
I had sat down without the slightest thought of sleeping. And there as I
sat I had a dream—what did I dream about? the sermon, musing upon which I
had been overcome by sleep? not a bit! I dreamt about a widely different
matter. Methought I was in Llangollen fair, in the place where the pigs
were sold, in the midst of Welsh drovers, immense hogs and immense men,
whom I took to be the gents of Wolverhampton. What huge fellows they
were! almost as huge as the hogs for which they higgled; the generality
of them dressed in brown sporting coats, drab breeches, yellow-topped
boots, splashed all over with mud, and with low-crowned, broad-brimmed
hats. One enormous fellow particularly caught my notice. I guessed he
must have weighed at least eleven score, he had a half-ruddy,
half-tallowy face, brown hair, and rather thin whiskers. He was higgling
with the proprietor of an immense hog, and as he higgled he wheezed as if
he had a difficulty of respiration, and frequently wiped off, with a
dirty-white pocket-handkerchief, drops of perspiration which stood upon
his face. At last methought he bought the hog for nine pounds, and had
no sooner concluded his bargain than, turning round to me, who was
standing close by staring at him, he slapped me on the shoulder with a
hand of immense weight, crying with a half-piping, half-wheezing voice,
“Coom, neighbour, coom, I and thou have often dealt; gi’ me noo a poond
for my bargain, and it shall be all thy own.” I felt in a great rage at
his unceremonious behaviour, and owing to the flutter of my spirits
whilst I was thinking whether or not I should try and knock him down, I
awoke, and found the fire nearly out, and the ecclesiastical cat seated
on my shoulders. The creature had not been turned out, as ought to have
been, before my wife and daughter retired, and feeling cold, had got upon
the table, and thence had sprung upon my back for the sake of the warmth
which it knew was to be found there; and no doubt the springing on my
shoulders by the ecclesiastical cat was what I took in my dream to be the
slap on my shoulders by the Wolverhampton gent.
The day of the fair was dull and gloomy, an exact counterpart of the
previous Saturday. Owing to some cause, I did not go into the fair till
past one o’clock, and then, seeing neither immense hogs nor immense men,
I concluded that the gents of Wolverhampton had been there, and after
purchasing the larger porkers, had departed with their bargains to their
native district. After sauntering about a little time, I returned home.
After dinner I went again into the fair along with my wife; the stock
business had long been over, but I observed more stalls than in the
morning, and a far greater throng, for the country people for miles round
had poured into the little town. By a stall, on which were some poor
legs and shoulders of mutton, I perceived the English butcher, whom the
Welsh one had attempted to slaughter. I recognised him by a patch which
he wore on his cheek. My wife and I went up and inquired how he was. He
said that he still felt poorly, but that he hoped he should get round. I
asked him if he remembered me; and received for answer that he remembered
having seen me when the examination took place into “his matter.” I then
inquired what had become of his antagonist, and was told that he was in
prison awaiting his trial. I gathered from him that he was a native of
the Southdown country, and a shepherd by profession; that he had been
engaged by the squire of Porkington in Shropshire to look after his
sheep, and that he had lived there a year or two, but becoming tired of
his situation, he had come to Llangollen, where he had married a
Welshwoman, and set up as a butcher. We told him that, as he was our
countryman, we should be happy to deal with him sometimes; he, however,
received the information with perfect apathy, never so much as saying,
“Thank you.” He was a tall, lanikin figure, with a pair of large,
lack-lustre staring eyes, and upon the whole appeared to be good for very
little. Leaving him, we went some way up the principal street; presently
my wife turned into a shop, and I, observing a little bookstall, went up
to it, and began to inspect the books. They were chiefly in Welsh.
Seeing a kind of chap book, which bore on its title-page the name of Twm
O’r Nant, I took it up. It was called Y Llwyn Celyn, or the Holly Grove,
and contained the life and one of the interludes of Tom O’ the Dingle, or
Thomas Edwards. It purported to be the first of four numbers, each of
which, amongst other things, was to contain one of his interludes. The
price of the number was one shilling. I questioned the man of the stall
about the other numbers, but found that this was the only one which he
possessed. Eager, however, to read an interlude of the celebrated Tom, I
purchased it, and turned away from the stall. Scarcely had I done so,
when I saw a wild-looking woman, with two wild children, looking at me.
The woman curtseyed to me, and I thought I recognised the elder of the
two Irish females whom I had seen in the tent on the green meadow near
Chester. I was going to address her, but just then my wife called to me
from the shop, and I went to her, and when I returned to look for the
woman she and her children had disappeared, and though I searched about
for her, I could not see her, for which I was sorry, as I wished very
much to have some conversation with her about the ways of the Irish
wanderers. I was thinking of going to look for her up “Paddy’s dingle,”
but my wife, meeting me, begged me to go home with her, as it was getting
late. So I went home with my better half, bearing my late literary
acquisition in my hand.
That night I sat up very late reading the life of Twm O’r Nant, written
by himself in choice Welsh, and his interlude, which was styled “Cyfoeth
a Thylody; or, Riches and Poverty.” The life I had read in my boyhood in
an old Welsh magazine, and I now read it again with great zest, and no
wonder, as it is probably the most remarkable autobiography ever penned.
The interlude I had never seen before, nor indeed any of the dramatic
pieces of Twm O’r Nant, though I had frequently wished to procure some of
them—so I read the present one with great eagerness. Of the life I shall
give some account, and also some extracts from it, which will enable the
reader to judge of Tom’s personal character, and also an abstract of the
interlude, from which the reader may form a tolerably correct idea of the
poetical powers of him whom his countrymen delight to call “the Welsh
Shakespear.”