seeing the Menai Bridge by means of second sight, says: 'I will pass to
the land of Mona notwithstanding the waters of Menai, without waiting for
the ebb'--and was feeling not a little proud of my erudition when the man
in grey, after looking at me for a moment fixedly, asked me the name of
the bard who composed them--'Sion Tudor,' I replied.

"'There you are wrong,' said the man in grey; 'his name was not Sion
Tudor, but Robert Vychan, in English, Little Bob. Sion Tudor wrote an
englyn on the Skerries whirlpool in the Menai; but it was Little Bob who
wrote the stanza in which the future bridge over the Menai is hinted at.'

"'You are right,' said I, 'you are right. Well, I am glad that all song
and learning are not dead in Ynis Fon.'

"'Dead,' said the man in grey, whose features began to be rather flushed,
'they are neither dead, nor ever will be. There are plenty of poets in
Anglesey. . . .'"

The whole sketch is in Borrow's liberal unqualified style, but keeping on
the right side of caricature. The combination of modesty, touchiness and
pride, without humour, is typical and happily caught.

The chief fault of his Welsh portraits, in fact, is his almost
invariable, and almost always unnecessary, exhibition of his own
superiority. He is nearly always the big clever gentleman catechizing
certain quaint little rustic foreigners. He met one old man with a
crabstick who told him his Welsh was almost as bad as his English, and a
drover who had the advantage of him in decided opinions and a sense of
superiority, and put him down as a pig-jobber; but these are exceptions.
He is not unkind, but on the other hand he forgets that as a rule his