The Welsh and Their Literature: from The London Quarterly Review, January 1861, American Edition — John Shaqi
The Welsh and Their Literature: from The London Quarterly Review, January 1861, American EditionBorrow, George
History
The Welsh and Their Literature: from The London Quarterly Review, January 1861, American Edition
Borrow, George
Welsh literature -- History and criticism
went to Donnington, near Shrewsbury, where, under a certain Scotchman
named Douglas, who was an absentee, and who died Bishop of Salisbury,
he officiated as curate and master of a grammar school for a
stipend—always grudgingly and contumeliously paid—of three-and-twenty
pounds a year. From Donnington he removed to Walton in Cheshire,
where he lost his daughter, who was carried off by a fever. His next
removal was to Northolt, a pleasant village in the neighbourhood of
London. He held none of his curacies long, either losing them from
the caprice of his principals, or being compelled to resign them from
the parsimony which they practised towards him. In the year 1756 he
was living in a garret in London, vainly soliciting employment in his
sacred calling, and undergoing with his family the greatest
privations. At length his friend Lewis Morris, who had always
assisted him to the utmost of his ability, procured him the
mastership of a Government school at New Brunswick, in North America,
with a salary of three hundred pounds a year. Thither he went with
his wife and family, and there he died some time about the year 1780.
‘He was the last of the great poets of Cambria, and with the
exception of Ab Gwilym, the greatest which she has produced. His
poems, which for a long time had circulated through Wales in
manuscript, were first printed in the year 1819. They are composed
in the ancient bardic measures, and were, with one exception, namely,
an elegy on the death of his benefactor, Lewis Morris, which was
transmitted from the New World, written before he had attained the
age of thirty-five. All his pieces are excellent, but his
master-work is decidedly the Cywydd y Farn, or Day of Judgment. This
poem, which is generally considered by the Welsh as the brightest
ornament of their ancient language, was composed at Donnington, a
small hamlet in Shropshire, on the north-west spur of the Wrekin, at
which place, as has been already said, Gronwy toiled as schoolmaster
and curate under Douglas the Scot, for a stipend of three-and-twenty
pounds a year.’ {28}
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