“Iolo walked night and day, and would see a timid gentleman home at any hour if only he could have a chair by his fireside to sleep. He got to prefer sleeping in a chair partly because his asthma forbade him to lie down, partly because it was so convenient to be able to read and write up to the last moment and during any wakeful hours. With a table, and pen, ink, paper, and books beside him, he read, wrote, and slept, at intervals, and at dawn usually let himself out of the house for a walk. During a visit to the Bishop of St David’s at Abergwili he was to be seen in the small hours pacing the hall of the episcopal palace, in his nightcap, a book in one hand, a candle in the other. Probably he read enormously, but too much alone, and with too little intercourse with other readers. Besides his native Welsh he taught himself English, French, Latin and Greek. His memory was wonderful, but he had no power of arrangement; when he came to write he could not find his papers without formidable searches, and when found could not put them in an available form. I imagine he did not treat what he read, like most of us, as if it were removed several degrees from what we choose to call reality. Everything that interested him at all he accepted eagerly unless it was one of the few things he was able to condemn outright as a lie. I suppose it was the example of Nebuchadnezzar that made him try one day ‘in a thinly populated part of North Wales’ eating nothing but grass, until the very end, when he gave way to bread and cheese. “He had a passion for antiquities.” “What an extraordinary thing,” ejaculated Mr Stodham. “Not very,” said Mr Morgan. “He was acquisitive and had little curiosity. He was a collector of every sort and quality of old manuscript. Being an imperfectly self-educated man he probably got an innocent conceit from his learned occupation....” “But how could he be an old curiosity man, and such an out-door man as well?” “His asthma and pulmonary trouble, whatever it was, probably drove him out of doors. Borrow, who was a similar man of a different class, was driven out in the same way as a lad. Iolo’s passion for poetry was not destroyed, but heightened, by his travels. God knows what poetry meant to him. But when he was in London, thinking of Wales and the white cots of Glamorgan, he wrote several stanzas of English verse. Sometimes he wrote about nymphs and swains, called Celia, Damon, Colin, and the like. He wrote a poem to Laudanum: “‘O still exert thy soothing power, Till Fate leads on the welcom’d hour, To bear me hence away; To where pursues no ruthless foe, No feeling keen awakens woe, No faithless friends betray.’” “I could do no worse than that,” murmured Mr Stodham confidently. “He wrote a sonnet to a haycock, and another to Hope on an intention of emigrating to America: