We can hardly doubt that these plays, in which three, at the most five, but usually three persons took part, were common in Wales in the Middle Ages, and, indeed, down to the Methodist Revival, when all such things were set aside as of the devil, devilish. Of all the Welsh composers of interludes, Twm o’r Nant, or Tom o’ the Dingle, was the most famous. He wrote an interlude on John Bunyan’s “Spiritual Courtship,” on Naaman’s Leprosy, and an allegorical piece on Hypocrisy. He was born in 1739, and was married in 1763. His biography is extant and is very entertaining. His other interludes were “Riches and Poverty,” “The Three Associates of Man--the World, Nature, Conscience,” and “The King, the Justice, the Bishop, and the Husbandman,” and he was wont to act in them himself. These were all composed in verse, and were not without poetic fire, but the allegorical character of the pieces was against them. One great cause of the refinement of mind, as well as of manner, in the Welshman of the lower classes, is the traditional passion for poetry. The Welsh have had their native poets from time immemorial. The earlier poets are hard to be read, often from a habit they had of introducing words, wholly regardless of sense, to pad out their lines, or to produce a pleasant effect on the ear. But all this drops away in the later poets, and Wales has never failed to produce a crop of these, and their productions are read, acquired by heart, and go to mould the taste. Now look at the English bumpkin. What poetic faculty is there in him? Take the broadside ballads of England. Unless you stumble on an ancient ballad, all is the veriest balderdash. “To hear the sweet birds whistle And the nightingales to sing,” or again:-- “As I went forth one May morning To scent the morning air,” the final line of which is capable of a double interpretation--the bucolic mind rises to no poetic conception. It looks at Nature with dull, dazed eyes, and sees nothing in it. It does not distinguish one plant from another, its only idea of a sensation is a young woman dressing as a sailor or a soldier to run after her young man, and its only idea of humour is grossness. But the moment you come in contact with Celtic blood a ripple of living fire runs through the veins, the eyes are open and they see, the ears are touched and they hear, the tongue is unloosed and it sings. The sole conception that the vulgar English mind has of poetry is rhyme, and the rhyme often execrably bad. In my time I have come upon many a village poet--but never a poetic idea from their minds, never a spark of divine fire in their doggerel.