This line of reflection has been
followed by the accomplished Bishop of St. David's, and by the
Saturday Review, it is just, it is fruitful, and those who pursued it
merit our best thanks. But, from peculiar circumstances, the
Llandudno meeting was, as I have said, such as not at all to suggest
ideas of Olympia, and of a multitude touched by the divine flame, and
hanging on the lips of Pindar. It rather suggested the triumph of
the prosaic, practical Saxon, and the approaching extinction of an
enthusiasm which he derides as factitious, a literature which he
disdains as trash, a language which he detests as a nuisance.
I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the
practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh. It
may cause a moment's distress to one's imagination when one hears
that the last Cornish peasant who spoke the old tongue of Cornwall is
dead; but, no doubt, Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for
becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country. The
fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous,
English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the
swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation
to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a
necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern
civilisation is a real, legitimate force; the change must come, and
its accomplishment is a mere affair of time.
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