Welsh Journals

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The manuscript volumes in the Welsh language in the Brogyntyn Collection have been described in earlier instalments of this survey. It now remains to describe the loose papers and the fragments of manuscripts, the flotsam and jetsam of an old manuscript library. I hope to show how these minutiae from Brogyntyn illustrate the importance of preserving all literary remains however much they may have suffered from the toll of time and climate in attics or in cellars. The bound volumes by their very nature have an infinitely greater expectation of sur- vival than the loose sheets or incomplete texts which represent broken books or files of papers which may have never been adequately covered and protected. There are examples of both classes in the Brogyntyn Collection together with individual sheets of literary material. On several considerations pride of place belongs to a fragment of a translation into Welsh of Eikon Basilike. The translator was Rowland Vaughan of Caergai, Merioneth, who began his literary career by publishing in 1629 Yr Ymarfer o Dduwioldeb translated from The Practice of Piety of Lewis Bayly, bishop of Bangor. The fragment consists of an epistle dedicating the translation to Colonel Sir John Owen of Clenennau, Caernarvonshire, three stanzas on the death of King Charles and four on the translation, the text beginning towards the end of the twenty-third chapter on page 141 and ending on page 183 with the table of contents, a tolerably complete text of little less than a quarter of the original work. On page 182 Rowland Vaughan gives the date of completion of what he styles 'this rough trans- lation' as the 16th of January 1649 [/50]1, nearly a year after the execution of LLYFRGELL GENEDLAETHOL CYMRU THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES JOURNAL VOLUME VII. THE BROGYNTYN WELSH MANUSCRIPTS (PLATES VII. 11-12) CYLCHGRAWN Summer, 1952 X NUMBER 3.