The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-06-23 00:00:00

THE GORDOVIGION ROYAL EISTEDDFOD, OR,

MEETING OF THE BARDS.

• THIRD DAY.—FRIDAY.
The attendance this morning was very considerable, but
not so numerous as on the preceding day. There was, how-

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ever, no diminution of interest or enthusiasm. The hon.

President took his seat at half-past eleven o'clock.
The business commenced with the recitatation by the
bards of apigrammatic stanzas, chiefly in praise of the Pre-
sident and the objects of the meeting.
Mr. WM. JONES, (Gwrgant) of London, addressed the
audience in Welsh, and was highly applauded.
An air was then performed by seven harpers, who had
been drilled until they became capaple of playing in pretty
correct time.

The Rev. J. WILLIAMS, Rector of the High School of

Edinburgh, and Archdeacon of Cardigan, was then intro-
duced by the President, with a high eulogium on his abili-
ties. The rev. gentleman spoke as follows—Mr. Chairman,
Ladies, and Gentleman, as the greater part of my address is
more didactic than rhetorical, I shall take the liberty of
begging your patient attention. My present address is di-
rected to the English now before me, as well as to all those
who may be led to conclude that the English literature and
English language have no connection with the objects of
meetings like this. I hope to be able to correct this erro-
neous conclusion, and to prove to every true Englishman
that the philosophical learner of his own magnificent lan-
guage must have recourse to us and to our scholars for the
illustration of much that is obscure' or else that he must be
content to remain ignorant of much that is valuable and im-
portant. The staple out of which the modern race of Eng-
lishmen is formed, has been partly imported from abroad,
and is partly of home growth.. Not to speak of the Saxons,
the Jutes, and the Angles, we know that the Danes and
Normans contributed no small portion to the national exist-
ence. Still, however, the Britons themselves, of whom we
know, from the Saxon laws, that they continued to live in
social union with their conquerors, must have deeply mingled
their blood 'with that of the fair-eyed and blue-eyed sons of
Germany. The result of this amalgamation has been the
modern Englishman, who seems to have embodied in his own

ideal character the leading virtues and qualities of those dif-
ferent races to which he must look back as his common an-
cestors. The language of the Englishman was formed on a
principle similar to that according to which his national cha-
racter was formed. The thread of that magnificent web

which is now denominated the English language, has been

borrowed from various tissues; and-this very variety gives
both a charm and splendour, and, what is more valuable,
durability and strength, to the article thus heterogeneously
formed. (Cheers.) The words which arc current in the
mouths of Englishmen may be compared to coins, bearing
the stamp and impress of foreign mints, with the laws of the
land, or what, in such cases, is more powerful, custom, has
rendered a legal and sufficient tender for all debts incurred
in our mutual intercourse. Some of these words bear distinctly,

others more faintly, the character of Kcllaric, or Grecian pa-
rentage; a great portion of them have therimage or strperscrip-
tion of the Roman Camars indelibly impressed upon them ;
whilsta third class were imported neat, by the original proprie-
tors, from the wilds and forests of Germany and Scandinavia,
Yet there still remains no small portion of household terms,
of the very words you use in your daily intercourse, of which
we Welshmen are the original proprietors, and of which you
in vain seek the true interpretation at the hands of the Greek,
Roman, German, or Scandinavian scholar. (Applause.) For
the solution of your difficulties, in such cases, you must have

recourse to the Welsh ; and, trust me, ladies and gentlemen,
that as, in the words of the philosophical and judicious
Niebuhr, "their language is the most imperishable monu-
ment of their fame, which nations can ever rqar," it is your
duty, possessed as you are of one of the most impressive and
energetic languages which the world has ever seen, to take
care that no clouds and darkness are allowed to settle on any

portion of its sources, but that all are placed in the full light
and brilliancy of day. (Much cheering.) The time will come
when the English language will cover the world in broader
and more continuous zones than have ever been occupied by
preceding tongues. The Greek once held an extensive sway
over no small portion of the ancient world, yet we have every
reason to infer that twice as many human beings, even now,
utter the language of Shakspeare and Milton as ever, during
one age, re-echoed the words of Sophocles and of Homer.
And if this be true now, what will the wondefful effect be
when the whole of North America, when Australia, with its
various dependencies, when Hindostan and Southern Africa
shall have been peopled by men of English race and of Eng-
lish habits ? Oh, how will these various colonies, planted on
every soil and under every clime, and on whom it may be
said, without hyperbole, that the sun never sets—how will
they turn, in the days of their prosperity, to an examination
of that language and of that literature from which their own
civilisation will have taken its peaceful hue and character. If
you knew the labour—often, I may say, the fruitless labour—
with which learned men have sat down to illustrate the first
principles of the Greek and Latin languages—to remove the
dark cloud that hovers round and above their sources ; if you
knew what volumes on volumes have been vainly compiled
concerning the Pelasgi of Greece, the Umbri, the Osi, and
the Tassi of Italy, similar in their present feelings to Welsh-
men; for what the Pelasgi were to Greece, the Osi, Sabini,
and Umbri to Rome, the old Britons of Cumberland, of
Wales, of Cornwall, and of Brittany are to England. It is,
therefore, your duty to take care that your countrymen do
not commit the mistake which was committed by the proud
Greeks and disdainful Romans, but to take the necessary
steps to secure the transmission of your language and litera-
ture to your own descendants, in the various regions which
Englishmen are destined to people, over the face of the whole
globe. To do this, you ought to aid and help us in embody-
ing in your own immortal language our ancient literature, and
to establish professors in the universities for the purpose of
illUstrating our important language and literature. (Cheers.)
To prove that these steps are necessary to the due under-
standing of the English language, I shall adduce a few ex-
amples—a few, not because the materials are scanty,
but because philological discussions are not the most
attractive subjects for a popular audience. (Encou-
raging applause for the rev. gentleman to proceed.) Al-
most the first words by which mankind embody their
feelings are those expressive of the senses. I look around
me now, and you look on me. You eye me, and lam eyed
by you. Ladies and gentlemen, that word look belongs to
our language. It is the root lug, and from that your English
word look is derived. I hope, therefore, you will never look
again on a Cambro-Briton without remembering to whom
you are indebted for the word. In your language is the word
hear, and you hear me now, It is a good Saxon word, de-
rived, by the addition of the aspirate, from the organ of hear-
ing. But when you venture to exert a deeper action in hear-
ing, you are then said to listen. Then you come to us ; for
the word you call listen, is derived from-the Welsh crust, the
ear, and from clwych, to hear. I tread the stage now, for the
first time in my life. (Laughter and cheers.) Do you know
what the word tread means ? You do not ; you must come
to us for that. It is derived from our own word traed, the
feet ; and when you go to your past tense, trod, we have its
representative in troad. I shall now conic to dress ; for I am
selecting, not the best examples that could be found, but the
most striking. Now, ladies, you have gloves and sleeves. It
is stated of your German ancestors that they had neither
gloves nor sleeves. Tacitus expressly informs us that the
German ladies were naked from the shoulders to the tips of
the fingers ; therefore, not having the thing, they could not
have the word. With respect then to gloves. The root of
the word is our Ilaw. The first attempt at transferring it into
your tongue is to be'found in claw, but the nearest pronun-
ciation is llov. The glove, then, is nothing at all but
the covering of the claw, or hand. We have been taught by
the Romans to wear gloves and sleeves. The latter are called
by us llavis, and the former manig, from the Latin manus.
Descending to the nether extremities, we konw perfectly well
that the Roman went bare-kneed. He could not, therefore,
be what the Greeks called brachatus. I will leave the gentle-
men to translate the word for the ladies. The English word
is very plain, and deduced from the Latin. We call the co-
vering of the nether extremities coisau. It first appears in
the Anglo-Saxon hosan, hose or stocking ; and from coisau
comes our coeswr, and your hosier. It had been often said
that we Britons, when invaded by the Romans were savages.
This is a falsehood, and a malignant falsehood. Merely be-
cause Caesar said he had heard that up the country, some-
where in the Orkneys, perhaps, there was a wild race, that
hearsay evidence had been taken, and put against the strong
and direct testimony of Caesar himself, who brought, to second
his invasion, a larger force, and a more powerful body of le-
gionary troops than were employed in winning the battle of
Pharsalia. He landed at Deal, and the farthest
progress he was enabled to make, in the whole
course of a long summer, NI as to Kingston-on-Thames, which
a modern army would reach easily in four days. Were they
barbarians who could thus check the immortal Caesar in his
career ? As the historian said, "he showed his terror-
stricken back to the Britons whom he had invaded." Caesar
describes us an agricultural nation, as well versed in all the
arts of life ; and when Cassivellaunus found that he was not
able to withstand the infantry of Rome, he dispersed all his
troops, and kept four thousand armed chariots to hang on
the wings and hover over the rear of the invaders. Now,
Caesar admits that he found us an agricultural people. Whe-
ther the Saxons brought grain with them from Germany, I
cannot tell ; but this I can tell, that the words which repre-
sent the main ingredients in the staff of life were borrowed
by the English from us. The first word is wheat, which is
nothing but a translation of gwen yd, or, as it is now pro..
nounced, gwenith (corn). The English word rye is borrowed
from the Welsh rhyg, and barley from our barlis. When
we thus catch goods belonging to us in the possession of
other persons, it is pretty plain that they have stolen them
from us. I haie something more particular to say on this
subject. Pliny tells us there was a tradition that barley,
which he called ordium, was the first grain improved by man
for the use of bread, and, as a proof of this, states that in
his days the first offering to the gods was always made in
barley grain. Now, coming to the Welsh, we find that the
meaning of barlis is bara-llys, (that is, the bread-herb,)
showing that the word is ours, and ours alone. I will now
take a common word or two, and show you that you cannot
do without our help in your ordinary conversation, that is,
if you want to know the meaning of the terms you employ,
and. not to suffer your language to remain like a barbarous
tongue in your mouths. The names of the metals are in
frequent use ; and two of the names which you employ are
borrowed from us. Those are Gres, brass, and haiarn, iron.
I have proved that many English words have been borrowed
from the Latin, of which the Latin will give you no satisfac-
tory explanation, and for which you must come to us. There
is a Latin word called torreo, which signifies to burn. Look
at the participle, and you find that it means a rush of flow-
ing water. From torreo you have torrid, as the torrid zone ;
and from torrens you have a torrent. Now, here is a most
extraordinary class of words. Torrens signifies breaking
with heat—breaking with cold. In our language, we have
torris, a torch ; and the root of that is also 'Welsh—it is
torn, heat: Heat breaks by too great expansion ; cold, by
too great contraction. The torrent breaks on the side of
the hill with its fury ; and the torch breaks up matter into
its component particles. Here, then, you have a common
source binding up all these apparently incoherent materials
in one general rule. (Cheers.) Were I not afraid of being
tedious, I could enlarge considerably on this part of my
subject. But there is one thing I must mention. Here is
your president ; he is the lord of many manors—(laughter,
which was excited by the emphasis which the speaker put on
the last word, thus, by a pun, giving it a double signification)
—but the manors, as well as the president, are truly Welsh.
(Cheers.) The old word is maiwor, and to all the manors
were attached charter-stones. To illustrate this 1 need not
allude to the holy stone of Mecca, nor to the Scottish stone
now in the towbr of London, once considered the palladium
of the independence of the Scottish kingdom. It was a very
common occurrence to have things called charter-stones in
the different parts of- the empire, and within the last thirty
years, in the west of Scotland, there was a dispute between
the new town and the old town for the charter stone. Hav-
ing thus, Englishmen, deprived you of your manors, I am
now going to repay you the compliment which you paid to
our ancestors and to deprive you of your country.—Laugh-
ter.) I have often asked an Englishman what he meant by
country. Sometimes he is going down to the country, using
the word in opposition to town. I have asked him if he was
not then (when in town) in the country, and his answer is,
" Yes, I am." I have then pressed him for a further ex-
planation ; but no further explanation can he give. Of
course be could not ; he could not, like the Romans, call it
patria ; and what does he do ? He borrows a word from his
vanquished foemen. Our word for country is not gwlad;
we employ that to signify a land reduced to social and civil
order. Where a people were divided into classes of different
degrees of polish, some were called tray, and some cern.
Thus in Cornwall the inhabitants say, countryvolk, (?) to
signify men bound by some social ties, which is, in fact equal
to the Greek politer, and to the Latin cives. It was not
every man who had an equal right to the title, or to be con-
sidered as belonging to the cliftray. The speaker then re-
ferred to the fact of the names of numerous rivers and moun-
tains, particularly in the south of Scotland and north of Eng-
land, being of Welsh origin, illustrating his position by taking
the names of those which he himself had passed iii his jour-