But I must not forget my excursion to Caernarvon, through these straits, which resemble so much the picturesque rivers of my own land. Many objects of interest enlivened the trip; but when, at last, the old walls of Caernarvon Castle rose before my sight, in all their feudal grandeur and historic dignity, I felt like one inspired with rapture, though not the less impressed with a sense of something awful and august. The character of Edward as a tyrant and a conqueror, seemed to stand before me in monumental gloom and massive solemnity—and when I thought of the feeble cries of the first Prince of Wales, as he came to light in this stronghold of feudal tyranny, and coupled them with those midnight shrieks, at Berkeley, on the Severn, in which his inglorious life was extinguished, I realized afresh all those creeping chills of terror, with which the wildest imagery of romance affects the sensitive imagination of childhood. There it stood, magnificently irregular in outline, frowning over the little town beneath, like a coarse bully domineering over a timid boy. Its towers are really stupendous, and the aspiring parapets and embattled turrets, that bristle up from their grim summit, make a strangely confused, but self-consistent figure, against the mountain back-ground, or the clear blue sky overhead. With such a fortress in full sight, it was most thrilling to give its history a mental review. Piled there by a cruel conqueror, to overawe the Welsh people, six hundred years ago, it seems less terrible with regard to them, than with reference to the story of his Queen, and his child. Such a nest for a new-made mother, and her babe! In the depth of winter, the stern husband sent Queen Eleanor here, to give birth to her child. In one of its most gloomy recesses the royal infant was born; and thus the insulting victor was enabled to continue the sovereignty of Wales, in his own family, while literally fulfilling his pledge, to give the Welsh a prince—born in their own country, who could speak no English, and whose character was without fault! Such a sovereign they had promised to accept, and to obey; and hence the title of the eldest son of British sovereigns ever since. Thus, what is morally a mean and knavish fraud, is clothed, in historic narrative, with the glory of a warlike stratagem, and survives in imperial heraldry as if there were no truth in the saying of the poet, that the herald’s art can never “blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.”