Though the view of the little place in its whiteness, embosomed in a grand amphitheatre of mountains, and watered by the first river of South Wales, is highly picturesque from any of the declivities above, the absence of this feature, in every village prospect so impressive, is a perpetual want to the eye of taste. But this is by no means, I consider, a matter of mere taste. I think the moral feeling must be, at least, much blunted in the man who can with indifference look on the fall of a churchyard's yews, and the violated nakedness of its aspect, with its exposed graves, after the work of destruction is done. Of all British trees the yew has the grandest associations in thoughtful minds. The connexion of the oak with our maritime power is but of recent date, for our navy is comparatively modern; but the eugh obedient to the bender's will," boasts an antiquity of claim as the chief agent in England's glory; for the longbow was the chief instrument of defence and conquest to Britons, before the "heart of oak" was heard of, or one cannon manned her "wooden walls." If the bow was a weapon of higher antiquity than the Roman arcus,-and though Herodotus describes reed as the substance of an arrow which Abaris, priest of the Hyperboreans, carried; as do the Triads, in which Gwrneth the marksman is recorded to have shot arrows of reed, still there cannot be any doubt, from the high estimation in which the yew has been held in after ages of Britain, that the wood of this tree was found preferable to every other for fitting out an ancient warrior, and exalted that instrument into the first rank. Of the bow as a national weapon, the many acts of parliament relating to it, and the education of youth in its use, prove the importance. Nid hyder ond bwa,-"no trust but in the bow," is a British adage.

But the yew has a stronger interest than any derived from bloody fields, for some minds. What ruin, monastic or other, even in our land, replete with such beauties, more solemnly affects the feelings than the ruins of an antique yew, the hollowness of its enormous trunk still yielding support to the massive black of the spreading head? The mystery attendant on its constant neighbourhood with the dead; the surprising length of its existence, surviving brass and marble monuments; preceding and surviving many a famous empire, and making the records of family antiquity, preserved in the edifice it shades, with such proud care in those labours of stone or metal, shrink into nothingness

before its earthly eternity; the gloomy darkness of its leafy ceiling, an aerial pall, for ever waving over those that sleep, and chequering into a mosaic of pale gold the common sod, protecting their rest beneath the moon and dews-all the circumstances attendant arrest the mind of the pensive traveller beyond the most solemn memorial, and "siste viator!" breathes from its ruinous porch or arch of shivered timber, without need of the graver's art.

In truth, what urn or tomb of men's hands can equal in real grandeur this vegetable one of finest form, darkest melancholy of aspect, and a thousand years' duration? The tree whose roots have writhed themselves in the very bosoms and perishing bones of so many generations of the village it adorns, is not only a beautiful cenotaph, but a real tomb. Can it be considered empty of human remains? It seems not a fantastic overstretch of thought to regard this sable growth of a human soil as an actual ossuary, or rather, natural catacomb of many family mummies; like those social urns of the Romans, where they sometimes deposited the ashy relics of many bodies united in life by affection. Here, by a species of transubstantiation, not entirely miraculous like the Catholic, nor wholly poetic like the Pythagorean, the departed still exist in the never-withering tree, and bow their sable heads, and stretch their shadowy arms, their vile corruptible putting on the incorruptible of nature, in their new being, over their friends and offspring, almost before their affectionate hands have ceased sticking evergreens and flowers upon the earth in which they saw them laid. The extent of a churchyard is so limited, in a little mountain parish especially, that the roots of so many yew's as often occupy that extent, must, in the course of ages, almost involve and reticulate, in their finer anastamoses, the entire cemetery soil, with all its once-thinking dust; from brains that have embraced the range of the universe, and reconnoitred, like trembling spies, the very throne of God; from hearts that have throbbed for their kind, and luxuriated in all the affections, is updrawn the very sap and life of the churchyard tree.

The loving survivor of a parent or friend erects a stone, or many stones, called a tomb, over the fast-perishing figure, in white clay, the sad effigy which alone, in mere reason's eye, remains of the dear and dead; but if the mourner long survive, his own faithless memento lies to him. "Here lies”—that was a truth to his young eyes is a falsehood

to those eyes grown dim, as he comes and leans his forehead and silver hair against a slab, deposited perhaps over the young lost wife of his youth,-a first love. Her coffin has long been mould; and that darker mould, which was her "sweet body," long shouldered out of its place by fresh ghastly "arrivals," and the throng of pale company has quite jostled the object he fancies there, till lost in the common mass of mortality. Yet, looking up, shall he certainly find her in the solemn aerial vault of that black mass overhead, through which the stars glimmer, and the owl cries, fearless through its denseness, close to his ears. Spices and sear-cloths effect not so pure and so agreeable, and scarcely so durable, a preservation.

To the few clergy of Wales, then, to be supposed capable of this desecration of churchyard awfulness, many of whom are good classics, I would suggest, as an inference from these not wholly fanciful premises, that the feller of the churchyard yew violates a tabernacle of the dead; and, by outraging that "divinity that doth hedge" a corpse, the forsaken temple of a soul, commits the crime of an Erisichthon. I will not wish to such violator the mythological penalty of eternal hunger, yet such degree of that very unpleasant sensation as might attach to the forfeiture of the church thus stripped of its old honours, scarcely seems too severe an imprecation on a perseverance in the practice. I would beg to remind the pastor, that as he owes his just rank to the church, architecturally speaking,-from the churchyard sprung originally that edifice "whence cometh his salvation," for the cemetery gave rise to the place of worship, and not the latter to the cemetery. The solemnity which human interment imparted to the chosen earth, attracted thither the zealous to pray and converse; and the next step was the erection of a place of worship over the remains they revered. On the conversion of the Saxons by St. Augustine, Mellitus, the abbot who came over with him, was thus commanded by Pope Gregory the Great, according to Bede: "On the day of dedication, or birth-day of the holy martyrs, whose reliques are there placed, let the people make to themselves booths of the boughs of trees, round

* Erasmus, in his Adages, expends much learning on the subject of "beans," which were much used by the Romans in rites relating to the dead. He quotes Pliny as interdicting this species of pulse on the authority of Pythagoras, "beans contain the souls of the dead." For "beans," read "yows."

about those very churches that had been the temples of idols, and, in a religious way, to observe a feast," &c. The politic pope, we may remark by the way, in this permission, as a mode of attracting the people, had an eye to the paganalia, or "country feast" of the Romans. The " religious way," degenerating into a purely convivial way, gave rise to our common Sunday drinking and feasting bout in rural districts, the wake. From those leafy booths, those wattled oratories, thus rising for the living in the dormitories of the dead, grew our most majestic cathedral, as well as the humblest worship-place that surprises the traveller peeping from some mountain dingle, and only distinguishable from a time-tinted barn by its companion or companions, of far nobler presence, the yew, marking its site, in a bird's-eye view, by that figured gloom under the softest summer sky, which instantly recalls the thoughts from the lark and the deep blue, to the "place appointed for all living."

The extreme nature of this last heresy against taste, will I trust excuse me, gentlemen, to you and your readers, for expatiating thus at large on it. I must not venture on fresh topics, unless very briefly, to point them out for the remarks of others. I know not whether having addressed the regular clergy, the dissenting members of the Church will excuse my addressing a single hint to their pastors. The influence acquired by all preachers, and I include all sects where the oratorical art is practised in the pulpit, after the fashion of the ancient orators; that is cum manibus et pedibus over the Welsh, especially in districts of great simplicity, is undeniably great. Whence arises it that conventicles and tippling houses increase almost in equal ratio, and ranting and immorality are on the "march" throughout Wales almost equo passu?

True charity and pure morality, as part at least of Christian duty, ought, I conceive, to form part of the injunctions so vehemently lain on the audience by the preacher, who can draw their tears, set them shrieking, and shake them as with a convulsion. Were the getting drunk on a Sunday or oftener than twice a week, (Fair time excepted,) shewn clearly, by his force of fist and logic, to be the real sin against the Holy Ghost which has divided commentators in opinion, would not the effect be great and good? In the course of this journey it was the fate, a pretty frequent one, of my two boy-companions and myself, to be benighted and lost. We were floundering in a soaking rain, a dark night, the

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hour ten P.M. betwixt a boggy mountain foot, and river side, not far, it proved afterwards, from the utterly solitary poor hamlet, Llanwrtholl, near Rhaidar. In the midst of "many counsels," in which was little "wisdom," (for what is the wisest man in the middle of a bog, "hungered" since cockcrowing, two sons equally blank and deplorable within and without, for advisers, bread, bed, and guide post, alike wrapped in a fearful obscurity?) just as we were about to follow none of them, hark! the happy sound of voices! Nay, hap piest of all, of singing voices, a pledge at once of good humour and promise of gentle guidance from the harmonists! By a welcome twang of the nasal, in the "concord," we became assured that those "sweet sounds" were not aerial, which in our Trinculo-and-Stephano plight of romance and darkness, and rain-water, we might have fancied them; and unromantic as it may seem, Ariel himself and his harp would have jarred abominably on our ears, after that gentler music of our fancies, fed now by hope, the bubble and squeak of a supper of ham and eggs, in a frying-pan; and that angelic creature we already saw frying them, no matter who, even were she another witch Sycorax. Alas for human hopes! After long knocking at the farm-house door in vain, an angry member of that singing body appeared, but most reluctantly. It was a Meeting!* Our intrusion, even to the modest extent of asking our way, seemed a profanation. The man who came from listening to a furious declaimer on the religious belief of that Founder who said "Suffer little children to come unto me," thought it much, in a surly whisper with a nasal groan, to conduct my "little children" and self a few paces to the house end, and leave us in a swamp he called a lane, to find our way by a verbal direction; short, and quite impossible for us to follow, as he must have known very well. So much for the practical and the theoretical in Christianity! After so long a tirade, I know not if I ought to mention the following incident, shortly as it may be told. My horse took fright so as to endanger me, one day, at the breaking out, all at once, of the zeal of a preacher, whose lungs were of more than ordinary power; how many horse, I never heard. Would it not be merciful to passengers, where a chapel adjoins a road, to station one at the door to give fair warning of what is coming, as prior to the earrending report of firearms, and their fatal effect, a just ma

"A meeting," in Wales, by common acceptation, means a congregation met together for the celebration of religious ceremonies.