From Tredegar Park we immediately crossed the Ebwy by a long narrow bridge, and presently entered NEWPORT, a dirty ill-built town nearly comprized in one long street winding down a bank of the river Usk. The eminence on which its church is situated, at the upper part of the town, affords a very fine prospect of the surrounding country; at the extremity of the town appears its ruined castle, watered by the silvery Usk: an intermixture of wood and pasture clothes the surrounding hills and valleys: the wild mountains about Pont-y-pool are strongly contrasted by the fertile tract of Wentloog and Caldecot levels, and the noble expanse of the Bristol channel backed by the cultivated hills of Somersetshire. The church exhibits the architecture of several ages: its nave comprehends the original church, which is of the oldest mode of building, and may be considered as of a date prior to the settlement of the Normans: the chancel and ailes are of later architecture. The western doorway, connected with the ancient chapel of St. Mary, now converted into a burying-place, and which was formerly the grand entrance, exhibits a curious specimen of Saxon carving, in a circular archway, with hatched and indented mouldings resting on low columns with capitals of rude foliage. The church contains three ancient monuments; but its chief ornament is the high square embattled towers built by Henry the Third, in gratitude for the attachment of the townsmen to his cause during his contest with the barons. St. Wooloo, the patron of this spot, is held in high veneration by the natives. He retired from the pride and pageantry of kinghood, to lead a life of prayer and mortification: a lowly cottage was his dwelling; sackcloth his apparel; he lived by the labour of his hands; the crystal rill afforded his only beverage, and barley bread, rendered more disrelishing by a sprinkling of ashes, his constant food. He left this world for better fare in the next about the end of the fifth century.