Now, however our readers may account for such incidents, the only purpose in introducing such a story here, is to say that it gives a fair illustration of that peculiar cast of ideal imagination which pervaded the Welsh mind, and influenced at once the impressions both of preachers and hearers.
There is, perhaps, no other spot on our British soil where “the old order” has so suddenly “changed” as in Wales: the breaking open the mountains for mining purposes has led to the thronging of dense populations on spots which were, only a few years since, unbroken solitudes. Ruins, which the sentimental idler never visited, wrecks of castles and abbeys crumbling into dust, isolated places through which we passed thirty years since, which seemed as though they never could be invaded by the railway whistle, or scarcely reached by the penny postman, now lie on the great highway of the train. It is not saying too much to affirm that there is no spot in Europe where the traveller is so constantly brought into the neighbourhood of old magnificence, the relics of vanished cities.
The wonder grows as to what was the state of ancient society in Wales. An eminent traveller says: “In England our ancestors have left us, dispersed in various places, splendid remains of their greatness; but in Wales you cannot travel ten miles without coming upon some vestige of antiquity which in another country you would go fifty to trace out.” It is of such spots that a Welsh poet, Dyer, says:—
“The pilgrim oft, At dead of night, ’mid his orisons hears, Aghast, the voice of Time disparting towers, Tumbling all precipitate, all down-dashed, Rattling around, loud thundering to the moon.”
What an illustration of this is St. David’s!—a little miserable village, with the magnificent remains of its great palace, and the indications of its once splendid cathedral; itself now a kind of suffragan, it once numbered seven suffragans within its metropolitan pale—Worcester, Hereford, Llandaff, Bangor, St. Asaph, Llanbadarn, and Margam. The mitre now dimly beaming at almost the lowest step of the ecclesiastical ladder, once shone with so proud a lustre as to attract the loftiest ecclesiastics. St. David’s numbers one saint, three lord-treasurers, one lord privy-seal, one chancellor of Oxford, one chancellor of England, and, in Farrar, one illustrious martyr.