Welsh Journals

Tunbridge Wells, Liverpool and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, Cardiff, Newport and Swansea, and let him examine them closely; he will soon be persuaded of each town's uniqueness. "But," says the sceptic, "this is all very well. That there is a difference between Brighton and Bournemouth and the others is obvious enough. What I want to know is how are you going to give any personality to those numerous little sleepy country towns that are as alike as two peas ? You will notice that he has caught our bad habit of begging the question. But at first sight he seems to have us in a corner. How often have I paused on every charm, The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm. The neverfailing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topp'd the neighbouring hill." The quotation seems to apply most justly to so many villages or country towns that we know, and indeed within its broad limits it does so apply. But the limits are so broad that possibilities of variation remain at infinity. One such village may possibly answer to all that Goldsmith had in mind when he wrote those lines; assuredly there can be no other. One, for all its quiet exterior, will be seething with revolt, Radical to the core-always agin' the Govern- ment and agin' the Squire-dreamers of freedom will be born there, poets and wild philosophers, with outlaws, highwaymen, or even Mr. Ponderevos to balance and fulfil them. One will be hard, stern, puritan, crushing the sparks of joy from its children with doctrines of Hell fire. Another beauti- fully and childishly devout. Another will be a place of endless quarrels,-another peaceable and tolerant, -another lax and wasteful,-another solid and business-like. No two, we can be sure, will be alike either in features or personality. But though each town and village has its own personality, we must remember that personality is not static. It is a thing of growth and change, sometimes spasmodically rapid, sometimes slow and steady like the growth of a tree. And, as with the opening out of sudden possibilities of wealth and importance a man's personality is sometimes changed almost beyond recognition. so it is with towns, except that in them the possibilities are even greater than in the case of men. There are many such towns in Wales to-day; forty years ago this gaunt and grimy shipping port, whose streets are filled with the sailors of all nations and in whose mien one can read nothing but the tale of greed and hustle and ever-grinding competition, whose masters are now of European importance and whose servants have almost lost their souls in slavery -forty years ago, perhaps, it was some quiet little fishing village, where the fields were on speaking terms with the sea and the villagers were farmers of both, and where the rich man was as rare a pheno- menon as his corollary, the destitute. Other fishing villages have become sea-side resorts market towns have almost lost themselves in the midst of collieries and rows upon rows of mean streets. Again it sometimes happens, though more rarely, that the change in circumstances has acted in con- trary fashion. Perhaps some industry has died a natural death, perhaps it has been killed by railway rates or failed to hold its own against advancing competition however this may be there are towns in Wales to-day, which seem no more than mourning ghosts of their lost selves their streets are desolate and none but the old remain. And so while every town has its own personality, he is rash who would dare predict what his town will be like even twenty years ahead. The present is a time of rapid growth, towns are springing up like mushrooms and in their wake poverty and wealth, those two great moulders of our destiny, go hand in hand. Other towns there are which in the course of years seem scarcely to change at all. London, I have no doubt, would be easily recognised by an Elizabethan or a Georgian outwardly, perhaps, it would astonish them at first, but when they had recovered from amazement at electricity and steam and a few other unessential similar things, they would know her for their old mistress. The soul of London remains the same. Pepys and Dr. Johnson loved her for the very same reasons that make E. V. Lucas and Gilbert Chesterton her champions. Roger Bacon would probably feel as much at home in Oxford to-day as Francis Bacon would at Cambridge. The socks and ties of the undergraduates have gone through many changes their souls are constant or so nearly so that those few hundred years have failed to mark a per- ceptible variation. And perhaps it is the personality of these constant towns that is the very best. They are like some friends who are always to be depended on, they have always given and will always give us their own very unique selves, unchanged by fashion and unwarped by creeping time. It is proposed to present each month in the Welsh Outlook a portract or character sketch of one of the towns in Wales. These sketches are not intended to be read from any specialist's point of view. Where the atmosphere of a town is given by its evidences of