my hands, and my elbows
planted on the desk; or, opening the desk aforesaid, I would take out one
of the books contained within it, and the book which I took out was
almost invariably, not Blackstone, but Ab Gwilym.

Ah, that Ab Gwilym! I am much indebted to him, and it were ungrateful on
my part not to devote a few lines to him and his songs in this my
history. Start not, reader, I am not going to trouble you with a
poetical dissertation; no, no! I know my duty too well to introduce
anything of the kind; but I, who imagine I know several things, and
amongst others the workings of your mind at this moment, have an idea
that you are anxious to learn a little, a very little, more about Ab
Gwilym than I have hitherto told you, the two or three words that I have
dropped having awakened within you a languid kind of curiosity. I have
no hesitation in saying that he makes one of the some half-dozen really
great poets whose verses, in whatever language they wrote, exist at the
present day, and are more or less known. It matters little how I first
became acquainted with the writings of this man, and how the short thick
volume, stuffed full with his immortal imaginings, first came into my
hands. I was studying Welsh, and I fell in with Ab Gwilym by no very
strange chance. But, before I say more about Ab Gwilym, I must be
permitted--I really must--to say a word or two about the language in
which he wrote, that same "Sweet Welsh." If I remember right, I found
the language a difficult one; in mastering it, however, I derived
unexpected assistance from what of Irish remained in my head, and I soon
found that they were cognate dialects, springing from some old tongue
which itself, perhaps, had sprung from one much older. And here I cannot
help observing cursorily that I every now and then, whilst studying this
Welsh, generally supposed to be the original tongue of Britain,
encountered words which, according to the lexicographers, were venerable
words highly expressive, showing the wonderful power and originality of
the Welsh, in which, however, they were no longer used in common
discourse, but were relics, precious relics, of the first speech of
Britain, perhaps of the world; with which words, however, I was already
well acquainted, and which I had picked up, not in learned books, classic
books, and in tongues of old renown, but whilst listening to Mr.
Petulengro and Tawno Chikno talking over their every-day affairs in the
la