to hold six or seven thousand persons. Then,
as is too common in England, the doors were
almost too narrow to admit a single file of
guests: and the huge neat-whiskered policeman,
with belt and badge (bardic again), who took the
tickets of singers, players, and patrons, blocked
this rude and straight portal so substantially,
as to make all entrance thither somewhat of a
heroic event.—But within, the good proportions
of the hall, flanked with galleries, decorated
with flags, balconied with white, pink, and blue
panels, decked with laurel-wreaths and garlands,
lit with horizontal lines of gas, and liberally
filled with a public, every face among which
was beaming with enjoyment, put one into a
festive humour.—There was far less of beadledom,
far less of gold chain and 'scutcheon work
than I had expected; though still, by fits and
starts, more than a Saxon could take religious
delight in. Generally the preparations on the
platform were simple to untidiness; and though
there was, of course, a President, and a state
chair, and a table, and a grand pianoforte, and
a row of busts of Welsh celebrities, and a huge
head of a goat also sculptured, which was
turned upside down, with Saxon want of respect
for its beard,—I am ashamed to say, that seeing
preparations for music and state, my mind
wandered with a sort of melancholy feeling
far away to the notion, that we get up better
Druid work in London, at Covent Garden, when
"Norma" is the opera.

But with all this disorderliness, there was not
the slightest show of licence. The chorus,
gathered from many miles round, numbering on
the first night four hundred persons, was made
up of iron-forgers from Merthyr Tydvil and Dowlais,
of the copper miners who so largely contribute
to the smell of new coinage perceptible
in the town, of workers from the small farms
on the soft wild hill-sides of the Neath and
Swansea valleys.—Yet not an instance of rudeness,
or bad manners, or drunkenness, did I
see; and I think only one discontented artist,
a man of Dowlais, with a bamboo-coloured beard,
and who was too much vexed at being squeezed
by his fellow choristers not to bestow his vexation
on us as he passed, seeing that there was
no one else in the way. "Iss and inteed," he
complained, " there was no room to sing." He
was pacified by a little neighbourly inquiry;—
favoured us with some particulars about the
competition on the following morning (we
arrived, did I say? on the eve of the first day's
concert), and also with the fact that he sung
beace.—It was pleasant not long after to see
him shoulder to shoulder with a rosy-cheeked
little girl, in one of those saucer-shaped straw
hats which look very shabby to persons who
recollect the probably much more uncomfortable
flower-pot of beaver, which was the height of
fashion in the good days ere Bards came in to
sing at Swansea by railway, from Baglan, and
the Mumbles, and Cwmllynfell.—Nothing, again,
could be conceived better than the relations of
gentle with simple. On the one side there was
no parade, on the other no sycophancy.

The singing of the chorus was a great pleasure
and astonishment. Nothing of the kind was in
existence when I first knew this thriving town.
Then if one wandered up among the hills, where
the wild tunes grow, and the tinkling of the
triple harp used to be heard, as well as the
clinking of the pot of ale, in every public-house,
—there might be heard pretty voices, as fresh as
the briar-rose on the cheeks of the girls who
owned them, and perhaps Pennillion singing,
—nothing wonderful, a thing hardly deserving the
name of improvisation, which any three singing
persons or more having an aptitude for rhyme,
some courage, and no fear of common-place,
could master with a week's practice. But the
union of many voices in those days was enough
to sour the sweetest temper. It may have been
to drown all consciousness of the psalmody, that
so many of the small clergy there belonged to
the Trulliber party in the Establishment, and
became so unequal to the performance of the
afternoon service.

Now, much as Shenkin of the noble race, who
believes that Eve belonged to Merionethshire,
would like to stand still,—Nature and the times
have been too strong for him. The enormous
stride which choral music has made in England
during the last thirty years, has compelled the
principality to follow.—The power and the pleasure
of co-operation have got hold of the men,
who come up from the mines, or ride home
from the forge on a grimy waggon along a
tramway, in the midst of scoria and cinders,
or work at trade in town, or at husbandry in
country.—The folk of Cornwall and Northumberland,
so far as I know, are far less tuneful;
and I do not fancy that the farm labourers of
Kent or Warwickshire would trudge so far, or
work so heartily, to get to a singing practice.
The spirit of melody lies deep in the hearts of
the Welsh.—Their women have, as a race, very
sweet, if not very strong voices; and recollecting
as I do the far more experienced trebles of
Bradford, Manchester, Norwich, and those we
hear in London, I can credit these maids and
matrons of Glamorganshire with admirable and
prepossessing natural gifts. The type of the
Welsh female voice has been most advantageously
shown and thoroughly appreciated in
England, by the delicious national singing of
Miss Edith Wynne.—It is impossible to recal
anything much more real and attractive than
the sweet zealous concord of the chorus in the
charming old tunes, which have been so well
harmonised by Mr. John Thomas. One could
swallow a column of titles as fantastic and
foppish as anything in the book of Della
Cruscan folly—one could let pass display after
display of unnatural and puerile pretension— for
the sake of anything so real and so peculiar.
Never could melodies, never chorus, have
been more heartily relished.—It was curious and
pleasant to see how one bass singer, who could
not constrain his delight, made a running accom-
paniment to the tune while it rose or fell, up and
down the back seam of his neighbour's coat, as
if the same had been the keys of a pianoforte.