westry, in Shropshire, where he married a respectable young woman,
who eventually brought him two sons and a daughter. From Oswestry he
went to Donnington, near Shrewsbury, where, under a certain Scotchman
named Douglas, who was an absentee, and who died Bishop of Salisbury,
he officiated as curate and master of a grammar school for a
stipend--always grudgingly and contumeliously paid--of
three-and-twenty pounds a year. From Donnington he removed to Walton
in Cheshire, where he lost his daughter, who was carried off by a
fever. His next removal was to Northolt, a pleasant village in the
neighbourhood of London. He held none of his curacies long, either
losing them from the caprice of his principals, or being compelled to
resign them from the parsimony which they practised towards him. In
the year 1756 he was living in a garret in London, vainly soliciting
employment in his sacred calling, and undergoing with his family the
greatest privations. At length his friend Lewis Morris, who had
always assisted him to the utmost of his ability, procured him the
mastership of a Government school at New Brunswick, in North America,
with a salary of three hundred pounds a year. Thither he went with
his wife and family, and there he died some time about the year 1780.

'He was the last of the great poets of Cambria, and with the
exception of Ab Gwilym, the greatest which she has produced. His
poems, which for a long time had circulated through Wales in
manuscript, were first printed in the year 1819. They are composed
in the ancient bardic measures, and were, with one exception, namely,
an elegy on the death of his benefactor, Lewis Morris, which was
transmitted from the New World, written before he had attained the
age of thirty-five. All his pieces are excellent, but his
master-work is decidedly the Cywydd y Farn, or Day of Judgment. This
poem, which is generally considered by the Welsh as the brightest
ornament of their ancient language, was composed at Donnington, a
small hamlet in Shropshire, on the north-west spur of the Wrekin, at
which place, as has been already said, Gronwy toiled as schoolmaster
and curate under Douglas the Scot, for a stipend of three-and-twenty
pounds a year.' {28}

The prose literature of Wales is by no means so extensive as the
poetical; it, however, comprises mu