fully printed. It was a call to the Italians of that town to celebrate the 20th of September, the entry of the Italian troops into Rome in 1870. It called, in the names of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel, on all the Italians in that town to meet together to commemorate that striking and glorious day in the history of their fatherland. The very sight of that poster seemed to me to convey a splendid image of the nationality and humanity of the Italians who struggled for a bare existence, and it gave me something like a redeeming glimpse of the life in that dreadful place. Therefore, I hope that in Wales we shall not look down upon the value of the poster, and I am extremely glad that both the Newport and the Festiniog Eisteddfod Committees have offered a handsome prize for the best pictorial poster for an Eisteddfod.

There are other by-ways of activity, about which one can speak in reference to decorative art. There are village crosses and memorials; there are memorial windows in church and college; and there are tombs. I shall not refer to-night to any of these, except by the mere mention of them, but I always feel that a very great deal can be done for the rekindling and fostering of beauty of design and honesty of workmanship in all these various features. I think nothing is more attractive in the villages where they still survive than the old Celtic crosses of the early centuries. They are silent witnesses of the generations that have passed away in those villages, and they are witnesses to this day of the beauty of design and of the instinctive skill which a Welshman in the early, the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries possessed. I shall be extremely glad when villagers themselves, or those who having left villages and prospered in the world and returned again, realise what a service they do to a village if they help to

raise a village cross or some form of village monument to those who, sprung from the village or countryside, have done credit to their birthplace and service to humanity. I was one day last summer in the little village of Llansannan, which is considered to be a completely out of the world place. There you find at the present day some of the most characteristic Welshmen in the whole of Wales. There you find a certain freshness and vigour of spirit and of activity and withal splendid conservatism of custom and tradition on the part of the villagers and the peasants, and I felt as I looked upon the open square of the little village that it would be a real addition to that village, and something that would perhaps kindle the young mind there, if a fitting monument, say a Celtic cross, such as you find in Glamorganshire and Pembrokeshire and in many parts of Ireland, were raised in honour of the men who have been reared in that parish. Four names at once occur to me as being worthy to be placed in honour on such a village cross. For a parish which has produced at various ages Tudur Aled, William Salesbury, Gwilym Hiraethog, and Henry Rees, is a parish which can be very proud of itself, and a parish which ought, I think, to raise for generations of its children a monument to show that it appreciates the services which men who have been reared and who have lived in that parish have rendered, not only to that countryside, but to the whole of Wales, and in a degree to humanity.

To sum up these stray thoughts of mine, I would say that our duty is, first of all, to banish from our minds the idea that art is something confined to painting and sculpture, and to impress, in season and out of season, by word and by deed, that the only real hope of art is in its constant application to industry and to everyday life. I would further say that it is our duty in our national

system of education, in our primary schools, in our secondary schools, and still more in our evening continuation schools, to impress the necessity for manual training, for training in the use of tools, and for training in various handicrafts. I would further say that we should give every possible encouragement to the suggestion, for instance, which was made at a Cymric gathering by Professor Herkomer, that we should not alone rely upon manual training and training in the use of tools and in handicraft in our present schools, but that there should be raised in Wales one, or two, or three Schools of Arts and Crafts, where workmen and others can be trained, and from which we can hope to secure an adequate and permanent supply of well-trained teachers. I further think that we should, so far as possible, by this means and by other means, encourage the establishment and the fostering of home industries, of village industries in Wales. This does not imply at all any piratical or quixotic desire to upset what I suppose must be the normal and permanent system of industry in this country by factories and by machinery, but there is still ample and abundant room for the development of handicraft in wood, in stone, and in metal.

If one asks how this can be done, all I would say is this: It cannot be done suddenly and quickly. The development of taste, the gradual accumulation of hereditary skill, and the diffusion of right ideas of design and of art among a people, cannot be achieved by passing resolutions or by plebiscite. They can only come by education, by right ideals, and by patience. If we have right ideals, if we give generous encouragement, and if we persist in well-doing, then I think we deserve the right to look forward stedfastly and hopefully to the dawning of that fuller and ampler time, when the cottages

of Wales, when the halls of council of Wales, when the. schools where the young of Wales are trained, when the temples where the manhood and womanhood of Wales pay homage to the Power that creates, and maintains, and guides, when all buildings and all products of the national mind shall show that there is a real vitality in the national art of Wales, in that art which shall mirror not only the bright fancy of the Celt, but that love of home, that love of things of the mind, that spirituality, and that serious outlook upon the mystery of life and the mystery of death which characterise the Cymry.

D

SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE FULLER STUDY

OF OWEN GLYNDWR.1

BY

"OWEN RHOSCOMYL."

THE air being now so full of the clash and movement of the "reawakening of Wales", the writing of this paper is only one of the things to be expected. For amongst the many names and catchwords which in a sort are shibboleth of the present unrest, that of Owen ab Gruffydd, lord of Glyndwrdy and Coron'd Prince of Wales, is one of the most frequent and potent; nay, one of the most graceful recognitions of our idols and ideals of recent years, was when, last year at Machynlleth, H.R.H. the Prince of to-day, referred with such good taste and feeling to "my predecessor in the princeship, Owen Glyndwr."

But the outsider to whom, before that, the deeds and person of great Owen had seemed to be for ever summed up and graven in a single line of Skakespeare-"The wild, irregular, Glendower "-may well be pardoned a little curiosity at suddenly finding that there are wide sweeps of vision beyond that line, that that line is but as a dewgemmed web sparkling in the sun across the entrance of a region well worth exploring. He may be excused a little eagerness if he discover that, looking at that line as at a star in the darkness of a still midnight, he see beyond it

Read before the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion at 20, Hanover Square, on Wednesday, the 12th of May, 1897; Chairman, Hubert Hall, Esq., Director and Hon. Secretary of the Royal Historical Society.