The scenery of Wales had a very especial appeal for him, and no wonder; for there is nothing like it in the world. Although I am familiar with the Alps and the other mountain ranges of Europe in their wildest and most beautiful recesses, it is with me as it was with Borrow: no hill scenery has the peculiar witchery of that around Eryri. It is unique in the scenery of Europe. Grander scenery there is on the Continent, no doubt—much grander—and scenery more soft and lovely; but none in which grandeur and loveliness meet and mingle in so fascinating a way as in Wales. Moreover, to Borrow, as to all lovers of Wild Wales, beautiful as its scenery is, it is the romantic associations of that scenery which form so large a portion of its charm. For what race in Europe has a story so poetic, so romantic, so pathetic as the Welsh? Over every inch of the Principality hovers that great Spirit who walks the earth hand in hand with his brother, the Spirit of Poetry, and throws a rainbow radiance over it—the Spirit of Antiquity. Upon this Borrow and the writer of these lines have often talked. No man ever felt more deeply than he that part and parcel of the very life of man is the atmosphere in which the Spirit of Antiquity lives. Irrational the sentiment about this Spirit may be, if you will, but stifled it will never be. Physical science strengthens rather than weakens the magical glamour of the Spirit of Antiquity. Even the most advanced social science, try to hate him as it may, cannot dim his glory. To the beloved poet of the socialists—William Morris—he was as dear, as great and as strong as to the most conservative poet that has ever lived. Those who express wonderment that in these days there should be the old human playthings as bright and captivating as ever—those who express wonderment at the survival of all the delightful features of the old European raree-show—have not realized the power of this Spirit and the power of the sentiment about him. What is the use of telling us that even in Grecian annals there is no kind of heroism recorded which you cannot match in the histories of modern countries—even of new countries, such as the United States and the Australias and Canada? What is the use of telling us that the travels of Ulysses and of Jason are as nothing in point of real romance compared with Captain Phillip’s voyage to the other side of the world, when he led his little convict-laden fleet to Botany Bay—a bay then as unknown almost as any bay in Laputa—that voyage which resulted in the founding of a cluster of great nations any one of whose mammoth millionaires could now buy up Ilium and the golden fleece combined? The Spirit of Antiquity knows not that captain, and hence the Spirit of Poetry has nothing to say about him. In a thousand years’ time, no doubt, these things may be as ripe for poetic treatment as the voyage of the Argonauts, or the voyage of the Cymric Prince Madoc, who