“It was as natural for this man in the picture to walk as for the sun to shine. You would like to know England, Mr Stodham, as he knew Wales, especially Glamorgan. Rightly was he entitled ‘Iolo Morganwg,’ or Edward of Glamorgan, or, rather, Ned of Glamorgan. The name will outlive most stained glass, for one of the finest collections of Welsh history, genealogies, fables, tales, poetry, etc., all in old manuscripts, was made by him, and was named after him in its published form--‘Iolo Manuscripts.’ He was born in Glamorgan, namely at Penon, in 1746, and when he was eighty he died at Flimstone in the same county. “As you may suppose, he was not a rich man, and nobody would trouble to call him a gentleman. But he was an Ancient Briton, and not the last one: he said once that he always possessed the freedom of his thoughts and the independence of his mind ‘with an Ancient Briton’s warm pride.’ “His father was a stonemason, working here, there, and everywhere, in England and Wales, in town and country. When the boy first learnt his alphabet, it was from the letters cut by his father on tombstones. His mother--the daughter of a gentleman--undoubtedly a gentleman, for he had ‘wasted a pretty fortune’--taught him to read from the songs in a ‘Vocal Miscellany.’ She read Milton, Pope, ‘The Spectator,’ ‘The Whole Duty of Man,’ and ‘Religio Medici,’ and sang as well. But the boy had to begin working for his father at the age of nine. Having such a mother, he did not mix with other children, but returned nightly to read or talk with her, or, if he did not, he walked by himself in solitary places. Later on, he would always read by himself in the dinner-hour instead of going with his fellow-workmen to the inn. Once he was left, during the dinner-hour, in charge of a parsonage that was being repaired, and, having his own affairs to mind, he let all the fowls and pigs in. His father scolded him, and he went off, as the old man supposed, to pout for a week or two with his mother’s people at Aberpergwm, near Pont Neath Vaughan. It was, however, some months before he reappeared--from London, not Aberpergwm. Thus, in his own opinion, he became ‘very pensive, very melancholy, and very stupid,’ but had fits of ‘wild extravagance.’ And thus, at the time of his mother’s death, though he was twenty-three, he was ‘as ignorant of the world as a new-born child.’ Without his mother he could not stay in the house, so he set off on a long wandering. He went hither and thither over a large part of England and Wales, ‘studying chiefly architecture and other sciences that his trade required.’” “There was a mason,” said Mr Stodham, “such as Ruskin wanted to set carving evangelists and kings.”