Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporariesHood, Edwin Paxton
History
Christmas Evans, the Preacher of Wild Wales: His country, his times, and his contemporaries
Hood, Edwin Paxton
Evans, Christmas, 1766-1838
Or, in the neighbourhood of the magnificent coast of Pembrokeshire, the
wondrous little chapel of St. Govan’s, the hermitage of the hundred
steps; and those splendid wrecks of castles, Manopear, the home of
Giraldus Cambrensis, and the graceful and almost interminable recesses of
Carew. A traveller may plunge about among innumerable villages bearing
the names of saints for whom he will look in vain in the Romish
calendar,—St. Athan’s, St. Siebald’s, St. Dubric’s, St. Dogmael’s, St.
Ishmael’s, and crowds besides. All such places are girdled round with
traditions and legends known to Welsh archæologists—the very nomenclature
of Wales involving poetry and historical romance, and often deep tragedy.
The names of the villages have a whisper of fabulous and traditional
times, and are like the half-effaced hieroglyphs upon an old Egyptian
tomb. There is the _Fynnon Waedog_ (Bloody Well), _the Pald of Gwaye_
(the Hollow of Woe), the _Maen Achwynfan_, (the Stone of Lamentation and
Weeping), the _Leysan Gwaed Gwyr_ (the Plant of the Blood of Man),
_Merthyr Tydvil_ is the Martyred Tydvil. Villages and fields with names
like these, remind us of the Hebrew names of places, really significant
of some buried tragedy, long holding its place in the heart, and terror
of the neighbourhood.
In a land-locked solitude like that of Nevern, Cardiganshire,—where,
by-the-bye, we might loiter some time to recite some anecdotes of its
admirable clergyman and great preacher, one of the Griffiths,—the
wanderer, after a piece of agreeable wildness, comes to a village,
enchanting for its beauty, lying on the brink of a charming river, with
indications of a decayed importance; the venerable yew-trees of its
churchyard shadowing over a singular—we may venture to speak of it as a
piece of inexplicable—Runic antiquity, in a stone of a quadrangular form,
about two feet broad, eighteen inches thick, and thirteen feet high, with
a cross at the top. Few countries can boast, like Wales, the charm of
places in wildest and most delicious scenery, with all that can stir an
artist’s, poet’s, or antiquarian’s sensibility. What a neighbourhood is
Llandilo!—the home of the really great poet, John Dyer, the author of
“Grongar Hill,” a delicious spot in this neighbourhood. Here, too, is
Golden Grove, the retreat of our own Jeremy Taylor; and here, in his days
of exile, many of the matchless sermons of him who has been called, by
some, “the English Chrysostom,” and, by others, the “Milton of the
English pulpit,” were preached. We made a pilgrimage there ourselves
some few years since, urged by love to the memory of Jeremy Taylor. We
found the old church gone, and in its place a new one,—the taste of which
did not particularly impress us; and we inquired for Taylor’s pulpit, and
were told it had been chopped up for fire-wood! Then we inquired for a
path through the fields, which for a hundred and fifty years had been
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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