_The Historian_ cannot fail of being interested while treading on the ground where Britons made their latest and most vigorous efforts for independence, against successive invaders; nor _the Antiquary_, while traversing a country replete with Monuments of the Druidical ages; military works of the Romans, Britons, Saxons, and Normans; and the venerable relics of numerous religious foundations. Beyond this stripe of country, from ten to twenty miles in width, forming the southern extremity of Wales, and an intermixture of rich scenery (particularly in the neighbourhood of Brecon), with prevailing dreariness on the eastern frontier, South-Wales exhibits a tedious extent of hills without majesty, valleys overrun with peat bogs, and unprofitable moors. Beside the superb ruins of St. David’s, the course of the Tivy near Cardigan, and the scenery about the Devil’s Bridge, it has little to entice the attention of the tourist: the towns, for the most part, are miserably poor, and travelling accommodations very uncertain; the roads, too, are wretched beyond any thing that a mere English traveller ever witnessed. It is, therefore, a subject of no small gratification, that the chief beauties of South-Wales are found in a compact route; abounding with good towns, respectable accommodations, and very fair roads. This part of the country may be explored in a close carriage, though the better mode of travelling is, certainly, on horse-back. The pedestrian may claim peculiar advantages in his way of getting on; but I do not conceive, that a man enduring the fatigue of trudging day after day through miry roads, can maintain an exhilaration of spirits congenial with the beauties that surround him. SECT. II. The geographical situation and present limits of Wales are unnecessary to be here described. Of its history, the first certain accounts that we collect are on the invasion of the Romans, when Wales appears to have been divided into three principalities: the Silures, the Ordovices, and the Dimitæ. The Silures possessed all that tract of country bounded by the Severn, the Tame, and the Towey; which, comprehending the counties of Monmouth, Glamorgan, Brecknock, Radnor, Hereford, and part of Gloucester, Worcester, and Caermarthen shires, comprised the greater part of South-Wales. The Dimitæ inhabited that part of South-Wales westward of the Towey; and the Ordovices, North-Wales, including Anglesea.