The president, I
am sure, showed a national spirit which was admirable. He addressed
us Saxons in our own language, and called us 'the English branch of
the descendants of the ancient Britons.' We received the compliment
with the impassive dulness which is the characteristic of our nature;
and the lively Celtic nature, which should have made up for the
dulness of ours, was absent. A lady who sat by me, and who was the
wife, I found, of a distinguished bard on the platform, told me, with
emotion in her look and voice, how dear were these solemnities to the
heart of her people, how deep was the interest which is aroused by
them. I believe her, but still the whole performance, on that
particular morning, was incurably lifeless. The recitation of the
prize compositions began: pieces of verse and prose in the Welsh
language, an essay on punctuality being, if I remember right, one of
them; a poem on the march of Havelock, another. This went on for
some time. Then Dr. Vaughan,--the well-known Nonconformist minister,
a Welshman, and a good patriot,--addressed us in English. His speech
was a powerful one, and he succeeded, I confess, in sending a faint
thrill through our front benches; but it was the old familiar thrill
which we have all of us felt a thousand times in Saxon chapels and
meeting-halls, and had nothing bardic about it.
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