Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: textit glish language. But to introduce such terms among the people, and make them common in Wales, would require a better Welsh education than is given in any part of the country. The relative strength of the Welsh and English languages in the principality, as far as I am able to form a calculation, is as follows, allowing the population to be, at the present period, about 900,000. 400,000 who speak Welsh only. 400,000 who speak both the Welsh and English, one half of whom understand the latter well, the other half but very imperfectly. 100,000 whose language is English, and who have no acquaintance with the Welsh. Having given a general but an imperfect outline of the state of society in Wales, it is necessary that some of the peculiar features of its character should be exhibited. Previous to the conquest of Wales by Edward the first, our nation was remarkable for its warlike disposition. The love of independence was so strong, that for its preservation, life was cheerfully endangered on the field of battle. The nation being divided into small principalities, without a confederacy under one general head, internal dissensions produced most disastrous consequences, and reduced us to one of the smallest sections of the human family. At a very early period of the present era, Christianity visited our land, and the Welsh nation became distinguished for its enlightened and celebrated men. It was under the care of Asser, a Welsh scholar, that Alfred the Great pursued his studies with so much success, and it was that illustrious monarch who founded the University of Oxford. It may be safely affirmed that no nation possessed men of superior knowledge, sanctity, and eloquence. Heaven has been adorned with constellations of saints, taken from among the ancient Brit...
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