“Iolo should have been content to leave it unproved that he was no poet. But he had not an easy life, and I suppose he had to have frills of some sort. “Well, he walked home to Glamorgan. There he took a Glamorgan wife, Margaret Roberts of Marychurch, and he had to read less and work more to provide for a family. By the nature of his handiwork he was able to make more out of his verses than he would have done by printing better poetry. The vile doggerel which he inscribed on tombstones gained him a living and a sort of an immortality. He was one of the masons employed on the monument to the Man of Ross. “Though a bad poet he was a Welsh bard. It was not the first or the last occasion on which the two parts were combined. Bard, for him, was a noble name. He was a ‘Christian Briton and Bard’--a ‘Bard according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of Britain’--and he never forgot the bardic triad, ‘Man, Liberty, and Light.’ Once, at the prison levee of a dissenting minister, he signed himself, ‘Bard of Liberty.’ To Southey, whom he helped with much out-of-the-way bardic mythology for his ‘Madoc,’ he was ‘Bard Williams.’ “Bardism brought him into strange company, which I dare say he did not think strange, and certainly not absurd. Anna Seward, who mistook herself for a poet, and was one of the worst poets ever denominated ‘Swan,’ was kind to him in London. He in return initiated her into the bardic order at a meeting of ‘Ancient British Bards resident in London,’ which was convened on Primrose Hill at the Autumnal equinox, 1793. At an earlier meeting, also on Primrose Hill, he had recited an ‘Ode on the Mythology of the British Bards in the manner of Taliesin,’ and, since this poem was subsequently approved at the equinoctial, and ratified at the solstitial, convention, it was, according to ancient usage, fit for publication. It was not a reason. Nevertheless, a bard is a bard, whatever else he may or may not be. “Iolo was proud to declare that the old Welsh bards had kept up a perpetual war with the church of Rome, and had suffered persecution. ‘Man, Liberty, and Light.’ You and I, Mr Stodham, perhaps don’t know what he meant. But if Iolo did not know, he was too happy to allow the fact to emerge and trouble him.