Before you venture here to pass, Take a good refreshing glass. And— Now this hill you’re safely over, Drink, your spirits to recover. By 1774, when Dr. Johnson toured in Wales, matters had somewhat improved. “We came to Penmaenmawr,” he says, “by daylight, and found a way, lately made very easy and very safe. It was cut smooth and enclosed between parallel walls, the outer of which secures the passenger from the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there broken by mischievous wantonness. The inner wall preserves the road from the loose slates, which the shattered steep above it would pour down. That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones which every accident may crumble. The old road runs higher, and must have been very formidable. _The sea beats at the bottom of the way._” [Illustration: PENMAENMAWR. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._] Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast, coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the more dreadful because left to the imagination. But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says, “it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering. Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy torrents _did_ sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to “where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large waggons.