The sixth and last grand prose work of the Welsh is the ‘Sleeping Bard,’ a moral allegory, written about the beginning of the last century by Elis Wyn, a High-Church Welsh clergyman, a translation of which, by George Borrow, is now before us:— ‘The following translation of the Sleeping Bard,’ says Mr. Borrow, in his preface, ‘has long existed in manuscript. It was made by the writer of these lines in the year 1830, at the request of a little Welsh bookseller of his acquaintance, who resided in the rather unfashionable neighbourhood of Smithfield, and who entertained an opinion that a translation of the work of Elis Wyn would enjoy a great sale, both in England and Wales. On the eve of committing it to the press, however, the Cambrian Briton felt his small heart give way within him: “Were I to print it,” said he, “I should be ruined. The terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of its wits, and I should to a certainty be prosecuted by Sir James Scarlett. I am much obliged to you for the trouble you have given yourself on my account—but myn Diawl! I had no idea, till I had read him in English, that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible fellow.” ‘Yet there is no harm in the book. It is true that the author is anything but mincing in his expressions and descriptions, but there is nothing in the Sleeping Bard which can give offence to any but the over fastidious. There is a great deal of squeamish nonsense in the world; let us hope, however, that there is not so much as there was. Indeed, can we doubt that such folly is on the decline, when we find Albemarle Street in ‘60 willing to publish a harmless but plain-speaking book which Smithfield shrank from in ’80?’