our own,
I said that I had heard the late Mr. Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, say at
a peace meeting at Edinburgh that there were more tears shed on the
occasion of the death of Mr. Bradshaw of the Railway Guide than when the
Duke of Wellington died. The _Saturday_ reviewer exultingly wrote "Here
is a blunder of Ritchie's; what Mr. Sturge said, and what Ritchie should
have said, was that there were more tears shed when Mr. Braidwood of the
Fire Brigade died, than when the Duke of Wellington died." No doubt many
a reader of the _Saturday_ chuckled over the blunder of "the literary
gent" thus held up to derision. But unfortunately for the _Saturday_
reviewer, Mr. Sturge died before Mr. Braidwood, and thus it was
impossible that he could have referred to the tears shed on the occasion
of the death of the latter. The laugh really ought to have been the
other way. But the mischief was done, "the literary gent" snubbed, and
that was all the _Saturday_ superfine reviewer cared about.

CHAPTER IX.
CARDIFF AND THE WELSH.

In 1849 I lived at Cardiff. I had come there to edit _The Principality_,
a paper started, I believe, by Mr. David Evans, a good sort of man, who
had made a little money, which, I fear, he lost in his paper speculation.
His aim was to make the paper the mouthpiece for Welsh Nonconformity. I
must own, as I saw how Cardiff was growing to be a big place, my aim was
to make the paper a good local organ. But the Cardiff of that time was
too Conservative and Churchified for such a paper to pay, and as Mr. John
Cassell offered me a berth on his paper, _The Standard of Freedom_, my
connection with Cardiff came to an end. I confess I left it with regret,
as I had some warm friends in the town, and there was a charming little
blue-eyed maid--I wonder if she is alive now--the daughter of an alderman
and ex-mayor, with whom I had fallen desperately in love for a time.

At that time Cardiff had a population of some 14,000. Lord Bute had
built his docks, not by any means as extensive as they are now, and it
was beginning to do an extensive trade in coal brought down by the Taff
Vale Railway. There was no rail to Cardiff then. To get to it from
London I had to take the rail to Bristol, spend the night there, and go
to Cardiff by the steamer which plied daily, according to the state of
the tide, between that port and Bristol, at that time the commercial
capital of the South Wales district. The mails from Lo