I returned to the inn, and called for lights; the lights were placed upon the table in the old-fashioned parlour, and I was left to myself. I walked up and down the room some time, at length, seeing some old books lying in a corner, I laid hold of them, carried them to the table, sat down, and began to inspect them; they were the three volumes of Scott’s “Cavalier”—I had seen this work when a youth, and thought it a tiresome, trashy publication. Looking over it now, when I was grown old, I thought so still, but I now detected in it what from want of knowledge I had not detected in my early years, what the highest genius, had it been manifested in every page, could not have compensated for—base, fulsome adulation of the worthless great, and most unprincipled libelling of the truly noble ones of the earth, because they, the sons of peasants and handycraftsmen, stood up for the rights of outraged humanity, and proclaimed that it is worth makes the man, and not embroidered clothing. The heartless, unprincipled son of the tyrant was transformed, in that worthless book, into a slightly dissipated, it is true, but upon the whole brave, generous, and amiable being; and Harrison, the English Regulus, honest, brave, unflinching Harrison, into a pseudo-fanatic, a mixture of the rogue and fool, Harrison probably the man of the most noble and courageous heart that England ever produced; who, when all was lost, scorned to flee, like the second Charles from Worcester, but braved infamous judges and the gallows; who, when reproached on his mock trial with complicity in the death of the king, gave the noble answer that “It was a thing not done in a corner,” and when in the cart on the way to Tyburn, on being asked jeeringly by a lord’s bastard in the crowd, “Where is the good old cause now?” thrice struck his strong fist on the breast which contained his courageous heart, exclaiming, “Here, here, here!” Yet for that “Cavalier,” that trumpery publication, the booksellers of England, on its first appearance, gave an order to the amount of six thousand pounds. But they were wise in their generation; they knew that the book would please the base, slavish taste of the age, a taste which the author of the work had had no slight share in forming. Tired after a while with turning over the pages of the trashy “Cavalier,” I returned the volumes to their place in the corner, blew out one candle, and taking the other in my hand marched off to bed. CHAPTER XLVIII The Bill—The Two Mountains—Sheet of Water—The Afanc-Crocodile—The Afanc-Beaver—Tai Hirion—Kind Woman—Arenig Vawr—The Beam and Mote—Bala.