No person can have heard anything of the Welsh religious life without having heard also of the immense annual gatherings, the Association meetings, a sort of great movable festival, annually held in Wales, to which everything had to give place, and to which all the various tribes of the various Houses of the Lord came up. Their ordinary Sunday services were crowded, but, upon these great occasions, twenty or twenty-five thousand people would come together; and, to such congregations, their great men, their great preachers, such as those we are about to mention, addressed themselves—addressed themselves not to a mass ignorant and unintelligent, but all thoroughly informed in religious matters, and prepared to follow their preacher whithersoever his imagination or thought might lead him. The reader must not smile when we remind him that Wales was,—had been for ages,—the land of Bards; a love of poetry, poetry chanted or recited, had always been the Welshman’s passion, and those great writers of our literature who best know what poetry is, have taught us that we are not to look upon those productions with contempt. For ages there had been held in Wales what has been called, and is still called the _Eisteddfod_, or _Cymreigyddion_, or the meeting of the Bards and Minstrels; they were, as Pennant has called them, British Olympics, where none but Bards of merit were suffered to rehearse their pieces, or Minstrels of skill to perform. These Association meetings were a kind of religious Eisteddfodd, where the great Welsh preacher was a kind of sacred Bard; he knew nothing of written sermons; he carried no notes nor writings with him to his pulpit or platform, but he made the law and doctrine of religious metaphysics march to the minstrelsy and music of speech; on the other hand, he did not indulge himself in casting about wildfire, all had been thoroughly prepared and rooted in his understanding; and then he went with his sermon, which was a kind of high song, to chant it over the hearts of the multitude. We shall have occasion to show, by many instances, from the lives of their greatest men, how their own hearts had been marvellously prepared.