Sir T.

Wiliems, of Trevriw continued.

vita Danielis.

recklessly abandons his patients, and settles down to cast his
accumulated material into final form. He tells us that during
the next five years he laboured so incessantly at his Dictionaries
that he lost all count of the days of the week, and became so
poor, that he and his family would have lacked the barest
necessities of life were it not for the generosity of Sir John
Wynn, of Gwydir. And what has been the meed of this noble
devotion to his native tongue? Three hundred years of forget-
fulness. He died no one knows when, he was buried no one
knows where. The abyss of silence closed round him unhonoured
and unsung. His life-work completed, he had not the satis-
faction of seeing it printed; but he had scarcely time to grow
cold in his grave before another entered into his labour, abridged
his work, and printed it under his own name.
This may
seem strange, nay even contemptible to the uninitiated, but
title-pages not unfrequently serve but as masks of truth. Dr.
John Davies's abridgment, the Dictionarium. Duplex of 1632,
remains to this day the most reliable work in Welsh Lexi·
cography. And yet no Welsh Society has ever proposed to
print the entire work of Sir Thomas Wiliems, and thus render
tardy justice to the memory of a scholar who sacrificed everything
to serve the students of language.

We are also indebted to the same hand for a unique copy of the life of the Welsh Saint, Daniel: this has never been printed.

In services to Wales and its literature John Jones takes precedence of all his namesakes. It was, therefore, natural to John Jones of consult the Dictionary of National Biography for the leading Gelli Lyvdy. facts of his life, but it was a fruitless idea: he is not even mentioned there. The Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen, however, informs us that he was an attorney in the court of the Marches " of Wales," and that he early withdrew himself "because he had "too much honesty to pursue it." It is clear, from particulars given in MS. 315 below, that he had personal knowledge of legal procedure, but lacked common prudence in business matters. It is also clear that in early life he had sufficient private means to make the pursuit of a profession a matter of choice rather than of necessity, and that his interest in the Welsh language, and its literature, dominated his whole life. For over forty-years we find him steadily at work making really beautiful copies of every old manuscript he could borrow,

and were it not for this supreme, though some what indis- John Jones, of Gelli Lyvdycriminate devotion of his pen to things Welsh, we should have continued. lost altogether certain texts, which no longer exist except in his transcripts. He was in the habit of inserting particulars about his originals, the date and place of writing, as well as his own pedigree, at the beginning of his copies. We therefore know that he spent a very large portion of his life in prison,— in the Fleet in London." How he got there may be read on page 1120 below. The great majority of his transcripts are now at Peniarth, but a very considerable number are distributed among other collections, though it is said that John Jones bequeathed all to his friend and kinsman, Robert Vaughan.

The transcripts of Robert Vaughan are also numerous and important, and some of them are wonderful imitations of their twelfth and thirteenth century originals, so much so that the unwary have been known to pay fanciful prices for his seventeenth-century copies, under the impression that they were securing very valuable old manuscripts. Robert Vaughan was educated at Oxford. He was a man of scholarly tastes, with a bent for antiquarian and genealogical research. The details of his labours are recorded in our reports. He was also, unlike John Jones, a man of business, who directed his energies by a steady purpose, pursued through life at what must have been a serious tax on his modest revenues. No student can refrain from paying him a most sincere tribute of admiration and gratitude for his prescience and skill in bringing together the noblest monuments of Kymric history and literature. Though it is true that his collection of Welsh MSS. is the finest in existence, still his merit was not in making it the biggest collection, but in securing nearly every manuscript of importance in the language, leaving transcripts to others. "Everybody" has heard of the famed Red Book of Hergest, our largest vellum MS., which is the glory of the Jesus College Library. But how many have noticed that out of its 1,442 folio columns, more than threefourths of the whole are mere transcripts of older texts at Peniarth. And this is by no means a singular instance. It is because Vaughan displayed so much knowledge and perseverance as a collector, because he hunted, rescued, and brought together under his own roof such a number of documents of the first importance, which to this day out-rival all other collections of

Robert

Vaughan, of Hengurt.

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