Education is advancing by leaps and bounds in the Principality, and sometimes lights heavily on the shoulders of some decent farmer’s son, and constrains him thenceforth to walk the world an example of the perfect prig. Culture, in fact, brings all the acrid defects of the Cymric character into prominence, and impels those who have taken it badly towards political nostrums of unpatriotic bias, or social “movements” where the faddist shrieks and has his being. XXXV Llangollen was “discovered” in 1788 by those feminine Robinson Crusoes commonly called the “Ladies of Llangollen.” Their singular story and the alliterative title have gone forth to all the world, and are familiar where the achievements of many worthier persons are unknown. If eccentricity may rightly be considered a proper passport to fame, then the Ladies of Llangollen are justly celebrated, but if the extraordinary mental obliquity that shaped their wasted lives be looked upon pathologically, the consideration they received in their time and the tolerant interest in them in later years must seem highly mischievous. When the Ladies first came to Llangollen, the place was but a village on the post-road to Holyhead. The newly established mail-coaches went a different route, and only one inn—the “Hand”—existed for the accommodation of travellers. But, although the road was rough, and the accommodation matched it, this was the route by which travellers between London and Ireland came and went; and so although the village was less than one-tenth the size of the Llangollen of to-day, it could not have afforded that “romantic retirement from the world” the two Ladies are said to have desired.