Since then it has flagged often
enough; sometimes it has seemed to stand entirely still; and the reader
may easily judge how it fares at the present, from the circumstance of my
taking pen in hand, and endeavouring to write down the passages of my
life--a last resource with most people. But at the period to which I
allude I was just, as I may say, entering upon life; I had adopted a
profession, and--to keep up my character, simultaneously with that
profession--the study of a new language; I speedily became a proficient
in the one, but ever remained a novice in the other: a novice in the law,
but a perfect master in the Welsh tongue.
Yes! very pleasant times were those, when within the womb of a lofty deal
desk, behind which I sat for some eight hours every day, transcribing
(when I imagined eyes were upon me) documents of every description in
every possible hand, Blackstone kept company with Ab Gwilym--the polished
English lawyer of the last century, who wrote long and prosy chapters on
the rights of things--with a certain wild Welshman, who some four hundred
years before that time indited immortal cowydds and odes to the wives of
Cambrian chieftains--more particularly to one Morfydd, the wife of a
certain hunchbacked dignitary called by the poet facetiously Bwa
Bach--generally terminating with the modest request of a little private
parlance beneath the green wood bough, with no other witness than the
eos, or nightingale, a request which, if the poet himself may be
believed--rather a doubtful point--was seldom, very seldom, denied.
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