Chapter III: The Vision of Hell (5)

{0e} “_Lowria Uxor Elizaei Wynne cler. de Lasynys vigesimo quarto die Augti. sepulta est Ano. Dom. 1720_.”

“_Elizaeus Wynne Cler. nuper Rector dignissimus huius ecclesiae sepultus est 17mo. die Julii 1734_.” (From the parish register at Llanfair.)

{0f} “_The Visions of the Sleeping Bard_. First Part. Printed in London by E. Powell for the Author, 1703.”

{1a} _The opening lines_.—Ellis Wynne opens his vision as so many early English poets are wont, with a description of the season when, and the circumstances under which he fell asleep. Compare especially Langland’s Visions, _prologus_:

In a somer seson whan soft was the sonne
I went wyde in this world wondres to here,
Ac on a May mornynge on Malvern hulles
Me befel a ferly of fairy me thoughte,
I was wery forwandred and went me to reste
Under a brode bank bi a bornes side
And as I lay and leued and loked in the wateres
I slombred in a slepyng it sweyved so merye.

{1b} _One of the mountains_.—The scene these opening lines describe was one with which the Bard was perfectly familiar. He had often climbed the slopes of the Vale of Ardudwy to view the glorious panorama around him from Bardsey Isle to Strumble Head, the whole length of rock-bound coast lay before him, while behind was the Snowdonian range, from Snowdon itself to Cader Idris; and often, no doubt, he had watched the sun sinking “far away over the Irish Sea, and reaching his western ramparts” beyond the Wicklow Hills.

{1c} _Master Sleep_.—Cp.:

Such sleepy dulness in that instant weigh’d
My senses down.

—_Dante: Inf. C.I._ (_Cary’s trans_.)

Now leaden slumber with life’s strength doth fight.

—_Shakespere_: _Lucrece_, _124_.

{4a} _Such a fantastic rout_.—Literally “such a battle of Camlan.” This was the battle fought between Arthur and his nephew Medrod about the year 540 on the banks of the Camel between Cornwall and Somerset, where Arthur received the wounds of which he died. The combatants being relatives and former friends, it was characterised with unwonted ferocity, and has consequently come to be used proverbially for any fray or scene of more than usual tumult and confusion.

So all day long the noise of battle roll’d
Among the mountains by the winter sea,
Until King Arthur’s table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonness about their Lord.

—_Tennyson_: _Morte d’Arthur_.

{4b} _To lampoon my king_.—The Bard commenced this Vision in the reign of William III. (v. also p. 17, “to drink the King’s health”) and completed it in that of Queen Anne, who is mentioned towards the end of the Vision.

{7} _The Turk and old Lewis of France_.—The Sultan Mustapha and Lewis XIV. are thus referred to.

{14} _Clippers_.—The context seems to demand this meaning, that is, “those who debase coin of the realm,” rather than “beggars” from the Welsh “_clipan_.”

{20} _Backgammon and dice_.—These games, together with chess, were greatly in vogue in mediæval Wales, and are frequently alluded to in the Mabinogion and other early works. The four minor games or feats (_gogampau_) among the Welsh were playing the harp, chess, backgammon, and dice. The word “_ffristial a disiau_” are here rendered by the one word “dice”—_ffristial_ meaning either the dice-box, or the game itself, and _disiau_, the dice.

{21} _This wailing is for pay_.—Cp.

Ut qui conducti plorant in funere dicunt
et faciunt prope plora dolentibus ex animo.

—_Horace_: _Ars Poetica_, _430–1_.

{23} _The butt of everybody_.—Whenever a number of bards, in the course of their peregrinations from one patron’s hall to another, met of a night, their invariable custom was to appoint one of the company to be the butt of their wit, and he was expected to give ready answer in verse and parry the attacks of his brethren. It is said of Dafydd ap Gwilym that he satirized one unfortunate butt of a bard so fiercely that he fell dead at his feet.

{24} _Congregation of mutes_.—At the time Ellis Wynne wrote, the Quakers were very numerous in Merioneth and Montgomery and especially in his own immediate neighbourhood, where they probably had a burying-ground and conventicle. They naturally became the objects of cruel persecution at the hands of the dominant church as well as of the state; their meetings were broken up, their members imprisoned and maltreated, until at last they were forced to leave their fatherland and seek freedom of worship across the Atlantic.

{25} _Speak no ill_.—A Welsh proverb; _v. Myv. Arch. III. 182_.

{26} _We came to a barn_.—The beginning of Nonconformity in Wales. In the Author’s time there were already many adherents to the various dissenting bodies in North Wales. Walter Cradoc, Morgan Llwyd and others had been preaching the Gospel many years previously throughout the length and breadth of Gwynedd; and it was their followers that now fell under the Bard’s lash.

{28a} _Corruption of the best_.—A Welsh adage; _v. Myv. Arch. III. 185_.

{28b} _Some mocking_.—Compare Bunyan’s Christian starting from the City of Destruction: “So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain. The neighbours came out to see him run, and as he ran, some mocked, others threatened and some cried after him to return.”

{29} _Who is content_.—Cp.

Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem
Seu ratio dederit seu fors obiecerit, illa
Contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentes?

—_Horace_: _Sat. I. i._

{34} _Increases his own penalty_.—Cp.

—the will
And high permission of all-ruling heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others.

—_Par. Lost_: _I. 211–6_.

{36} _Royal blood_—referring to the execution of Charles I.

{37} _The Pope and his other son_.—The concluding lines of this Vision were evidently written amidst the rejoicings of the nation at the victories of Marlborough over the French and of Charles XII. over the Muscovites

{43a} _Glyn Cywarch_.—The ancestral home of the Author’s father, situate in a lonely glen about three miles from Harlech.

{43b} _Our brother Death_.—This idea of the kinship of Death and Sleep is common to all poets, ancient and modern; cp. the “_Consanguineus Leti Sopor_” of Vergil (Æneid: VI. 278); and also:

Oh thou God of Quiet!
Look like thy brother, Death, so still,—so stirless—
For then we are happiest, as it may be, we
Are happiest of all within the realm
Of thy stern, silent, and unawakening twin.

—_Byron_: _Sardanapulus_, _IV_.

{44} _An extensive domain_.—Compare what follows with Vergil’s description (Dryden’s trans.):

Just in the gate and in the jaws of Hell,
Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell,
And pale diseases and repining age—
Want, fear, and famine’s unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death’s half-brother, Sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep.

—_Æneid_: _VI. 273–8_

{48a} _Merlin_.—A bard or seer who is supposed to have flourished about the middle of the fifth century, when Arthur was king. He figures largely in early tales and traditions, and many of his prophecies are to be found in later Cymric poetry, to one of which Tennyson refers in his _Morte d’Arthur_:

I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talks of knightly deeds
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made—
Though Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more—but let what will be, be.

{48b} _Brutus_, _the son of Silvius_.—According to the Chronicles of the Welsh Kings, Brwth (Brutus) was the son of Selys (Silvius), the son of Einion or Æneas who, tradition tells, was the first king of Prydain. In these ancient chronicles we find many tales recorded of Brutus and his renowned ancestors down to the fall of Troy and even earlier.

{48c} _A huge_, _seething cauldron_.—This was the mystical cauldron of Ceridwen which Taliesin considered to be the source of poetic inspiration. Three drops, he avers, of the seething decoction enabled him to forsee all the secrets of the future.

{48d} _Upon the face of earth_.—These lines occur in a poem of Taliesin where he gives an account of himself as existing in various places, and contemporary with various events in the early eras of the world’s history—an echo of the teachings of Pythagoras:

Morte carent animae; semperque priore relicta
Sede, novis habitant domibus vivuntque receptae.

—_Ovid_: _Metam. XV. 158–9_.

{48e} _Taliesin_.—Taliesin is one of the earliest Welsh bards whose works are still extant. He lived sometime in the sixth century, and was bard of the courts of Urien and King Arthur.

{49a} _Maelgwn Gwynedd_.—He became lord over the whole of Wales about the year 550 and regained much territory that had once been lost to the Saxons. Indeed Geoffrey of Monmouth asserts that at one time Ireland, Scotland, the Orkneys, Norway and Denmark acknowledged his supremacy. Whatever truth there be in this assertion, it is quite certain that he built a powerful navy whereby his name became a terror to the Vikings of the North. In his reign, however, the country was ravaged by a more direful enemy—the Yellow Plague; “whoever witnessed it, became doomed to certain death. Maelgwn himself, through Taliesin’s curse, saw the _Vad Velen_ through the keyhole in Rhos church and died in consequence.” (_Iolo MSS._)

{49b} _Arthur’s quoit_.—The name given to several _cromlechau_ in Wales; there is one so named, near the Bard’s home, in the parish of Llanddwywe, “having the print of a large hand, dexterously carved by man or nature, on the side of it, as if sunk in from the weight of holding it.” (_v. Camb. Register_, _1795_.)

{54} _In the Pope’s favor_.—Clement XI. became Pope in 1700, his predecessor being Innocent XII.

{55} _Their hands to the bar_.—Referring to the custom (now practically obsolete) whereby a prisoner on his arraignment was required to lift up his hands to the bar for the purpose of identification. Ellis Wynne was evidently quite conversant with the practice of the courts, though there is no proof of his ever having intended to enter the legal profession or taken a degree in law as one author asserts. (_v. Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry_, sub. tit. Ellis Wynne.)

{67} “_The Practice of Piety_.”—Its author was Dr. Bayley, Bishop of Bangor; a Welsh translation by Rowland Vaughan, of Caergai, appeared in 1630, “printed at the signe of the Bear, in Saint Paul’s Churchyard, London.”

{69} _At one time cold_.—Cp.:

I come
To take you to the other shore across,
Into eternal darkness, there to dwell
In fierce heat and in ice.

—_Dante_: _Inf. c. III._ (_Cary’s trans._).

{71} _Above the roar_.—Cp.:

The stormy blast of Hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on:
When they arrive before the ruinous sweep
There shrieks are heard, there lamentations, moans,
And blasphemies.

—_Dante: Inf. c. V._ (_Cary’s trans._).

{73} _Amidst eternal ice_.—Cp.:

Thither . . . all the damned are brought
. . . and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce!
From beds of raging fire to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immoveable, infix’d and frozen round
Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire.

—_Par. Lost_, _II. 597–603_.

{85a} _Better to reign_.—This speech of Lucifer is very Miltonic; compare especially—

—in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell;
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

—_Par. Lost_, _I. 261–3_.

{85b} _Revenge is sweet_.—Cp.:

Revenge, at first though sweet
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils.

—_Par. Lost_, _IX. 171–2_.

{87} _This enterprize_.—Cp.:

—this enterprize
None shall partake with me.

—_Par. Lost_, _II. 465_.

{95a} _Barristers_.—The word _cyfarthwyr_, here rendered “barristers,” really means “those who bark,” which is probably only a pun of the Bard’s on _cyfarchwyr_—“those who address (the court).”

{95b} _Sir Edmundbury Godfrey_.—A London magistrate who took prominent part against the Catholics in the reign of Charles II. At the time the panic which the villainy of Titus Oates had fomented was at its height, Sir Edmundbury was found dead on Primrose Hill, with his sword through his body; his tragic end was attributed to the Papists, and many innocent persons suffered torture and death for their supposed complicity in his murder.

{102} _Einion the son of Gwalchmai_.—This is a reference to a fable entitled “Einion and the Lady of the Greenwood,” where the bard is led astray by “a graceful, slender lady of elegant growth and delicate feature, her complexion surpassing every red and every white in early dawn, the snow-flake on the mountain-side, and every beauteous colour in the blossoms of wood, meadow, and hill.” (_v. Iolo MSS._) Einion was an Anglesey bard, flourishing in the twelfth century.

{104} _Walking round the church_.—Referring to a superstitious custom in vogue in some parts of Wales as late as the beginning of the present century. On All Souls’ Night the women-folk gathered together at the parish church, each with a candle in her hand; the sexton then came round and lit the candies, and as these burnt brightly or fitfully, so would the coming year prove prosperous or adverse. When the last candle died out, they solemnly march round the church twice or thrice, then home in silence, and in their dreams that night, their fated husbands would appear to them.

{106} _Cerberus_, _et seq._—Compare the seven deadly sins in Langland’s _Vision of Piers Plowman_, Pride, Luxury (_lecherie_), Envy, Wrath, Covetousness, Gluttony, and Sloth. See also Chaucer’s Persones Tale, _passim_. A description of these seven sins occurs very frequently in old authors.

{107} _What brought you here_.—Pride is the greatest of all the deadly sins. Compare Spenser’s _Faery Queen I. c. IV_, where “proud Lucifera, as men did call her,” was attended by “her six sage counsellors”—the other sins. Shakespere names this sin Ambition:

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
For by this sin fell the angels.

{108} _Sarah_.—v. Apocrypha, the book of Tobit, c. VI.

{110} If she and her scholars—Cp.:

At nos virtutes ipsas invertimus atque
sincerum cupimus vas incrustare. probus quis
nobiscum vivit multum demissus homo: illi
tardo cognomen pingui damus. his fugit omnes
insidias nullique malo latus obdit apertum pro bene sano
at non incauto fictum astutumque vocamus.

—_Horace_: _Sat. I. iii_.