by the gross at Bilston or Wolverhampton, they have generally finely wrought handles, made deftly and honestly by the village blacksmith, which stand, not the racket of a few years, but work as easily and smoothly to-day as they did when Elizabeth was Queen or Charles I was King. When you go inside some of these old houses, is there not a certain character about the size and form of their rooms which is missing in our more modern farmhouses? Take, for instance, the characteristic of every old Welsh house, the great mantel-y fantell fawr—over the fireplace, not a miserable little grate just stuck in a wall, but a real mantel, which is a feature of the whole room, where there is plenty of room for a fire, and where the family can comfortably sit around at night, and not feel that one is taking the whole of the fire, and that the others have to take a back or an apologetic seat. It is a joy to me that, in the better planned houses of our own day, the houses that are planned by our competent domestic architects, and that are enjoyed by men of wealth and taste, this great feature of the old Welsh houses, the fantell fawr is becoming, whether in the hall or in the dining-room, one of the striking and most pleasurable features. I am always glad to find also in old farm houses, not only that there is a spacious fireplace with a fine mantel, but that there is also in most of the old Welsh houses a collection of really fine fire-irons; and, believe me, there can be the display of as much real art and taste, and honesty of design, and of workmanship, in fire-irons, as in most of the pictures that crowd the walls of the Royal Academy. I always feel when I see these in a good many old Welsh homes that we have there the highest of the elementary requisites of art, viz., fittingness for the work they have to perform, taste in design, and thorough honesty in workmanship.

Then look at the furniture. I need not recall to your memory the quite modern furniture of most of our houses, the gimcrack things they are, without shape or strength. There is nothing in them which would mark them out as forms of furniture which are meant, not for one generation, but for a succession of generations, around which the associations and the tenderness and the love of home may imperceptibly and unconsciously cling so as to give a sacredness to the very atmosphere and surroundings of hearth and home. What was the main feature of the furniture of an old Welsh farmhouse? Not a pretentious and characterless cupboard with a thin veneer over badlyseasoned and cracking timber, and with loose and ricketty hinges, but the cwpbwrdd tridarn-a shapely and substantial cupboard of solid and seasoned oak. It is well proportioned, it is shapely; perhaps there is a dainty bit of carving on it, a few initials and perchance a date. At any rate, it is serviceable, it has served not one generation, but three, five, eight generations in that hearth and home. Are you surprised that there should be in Wales that strong affection and attachment to hearth and home, which very much puzzle the modern man, but which I think are a glory and a strength to the Welsh character and to the Welsh nation. I need only mention other features of the furniture and economy of a Welsh house, the dresser, the settle, the arm chair, the table, the eight-day clock, which unconsciously carry a message from generation to generation, and add to the wealth of associations and to the hereditary enjoyment of a home, making it possible, I think, not merely for the most beautiful home affections to be nourished, but making it possible from time to time to have issue from those houses men and women who can and must distinguish themselves in art and in other spheres of activity.

Of late years, owing to circumstances and conditions of life and tenure and law, the number of houses which are built by those who have to dwell in them is comparatively small, and we find as a result that, not merely are houses thrown up, so to speak, in our industrial districts suddenly and without much thought for anything except a quick return or a big dividend, but that now even in our agricultural and peasant districts the person who has to live in the home is seldom or ever the builder of his own house. It may be that this is inevitable, and that we have to make the best of it, but at any rate I think it is only well to face the fact that some of our greatest teachers say that we can never hope to have beautiful fitting homes so long as they are built, not by those who have to live in them, but by others, who have only some material or cash interest in them. Ruskin some wheresays, I think it is in The Eagle's Nest: "If cottages are ever to be wisely built again, the peasant must enjoy his cottage and be himself its architect, as a bird is. Shall cock robins and yellow-hammers have wit enough to make themselves comfortable, and bullfinches pick a Gothic tracery out of decayed clematis, and your English (and he might add your Welsh) yeoman be fitted by his landlord with four dead walls and a drainpipe? Is this the result of your spending £300,000 a year at South Kensington in science and art ?" Without entering either into the question of the tenure of houses and land in Wales, or into that most interesting question of the future of South Kensington, I think it is interesting at any rate, and perhaps right, that we should mark and ponder over this dictum of Ruskin ; for I must admit that, much as bustling generations and the multitude of the Philistines in this country have laughed from time to time during the last fifty years at the teaching and the dicta of the Master, yet time con

stantly brings him its revenges, and dicta, which thirty or forty or fifty years ago and even to-day, are scoffed at by busy, prosperous, pushing men, have a curious knack of being recognised as permanent and solid truths by the more thoughtful men and women of our time. I must admit that I do feel a certain sense of void as I think of the modern buildings, the farmhouses and cottages of Wales, their want of character, their want of anything like attractiveness of form, and certainly their want of anything like personal individuality. I repeat, I feel a certain void when, as I sometimes have the pleasure of doing, I pass through Swiss or Tyrolese villages and glens, and observe how the Swiss and the Tyrolese peasants can and do build themselves a home, fittingly proportioned, daintily carved with scrolls or inscriptions, with variations of line, and form, and colour, which give an individuality to each dwelling. I hope that, whatever may be the laws which govern the tenure of houses or of land in Wales, we shall do, as I am glad to find the committees of our Eisteddfodau do, our very utmost to impress upon the workmen and the handicraftsmen of Wales the dignity and the value and the possibilities of their every-day work.

I am not to-night going to appreciate or examine the work, precious pioneer work, which the Committee of the Newport Eisteddfod, and, in a more modest way, of the Festiniog Eisteddfod, are doing for art and handicraft in Wales. I believe that a perusal of the published programme of Newport and a perusal also of the manuscript programme of Festiniog gives one some sense of joy that the Eisteddfodau, not content with instilling a love for and helping the practice of excellence in music, in literature, and in poetry, are doing something, and, I believe, something substantial, to encourage those who build houses in Wales, those who own them, and those who work upon

them, whether carpenters, or joiners, or blacksmiths, or furniture makers, to put thought, and heart, and brain into the construction of homes, places of worship, houses of business, halls of council, which in themselves, in their furniture and in their surroundings, imperceptibly but very surely exercise a far-reaching influence upon all those, old and young, whose eyes rest on them, and who dwell in their midst.

Whatever may be our possessions or our want of possessions, our opportunities and institutions, or our lack of them, this at any rate is true, that there is in Wales a respect for and a love for books. Our countrymen probably draw as much joy and comfort and strength from books as the common people of any country. Some people, I think quite a number of people, believe that any paper, or any type, or any cover, is good enough for a book; they say that all they want in the book is the actual word. From my point of view, to treat a book in that way, and to say that any paper, or type, or cover, is good enough for it, is a form of sacrilege. It is a betrayal of one's best friend; it is shabby treatment of a man's greatest comforter. For what after all is a good book? It represents the most precious heritage of the ages, it contains the highest thoughts about God, Nature, and human things. It represents what mankind, by a curious but very sure instinct, looks upon as a permanent and imperishable treasure. Nevertheless, some would say that it is good enough for this precious heritage to be huddled anyhow into a tawdry or rubbishy cover or shoddy binding, with careless and blurred type, on cheap and nasty paper. Can we not in Wales give a nobler place, take a righter view of the value of a book, as a friend, as a comforter, as a strength to us? So far, what we have done with our books, as a rule, is to leave them in the