A DYING LANGUAGE [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sm,—With
regard to Mr. Owen Jones' rather sweeping statement in The Spectator of September 28th that no non- Welshman can form an opinion worth having on the above subject, I shOuld like to make a protest, on the strength Of nearly fifty years' acquaintance with all parts of Wales and the " Marches " (loosely so-rolled) and half a dozen longish books on their past and present, familiar (1 have good reason to know) to most educated Welshmen at any rate. Though an Englishman I have never made the blunder of regarding Welsh as a dying language. Mr. Owen Jones founds his statement on two authors who have written books on Wales or portions of it after a single tour, the one eighty years spa on foot, the other recently in a motor-ear. No Welshmen or • knowledgeable Englishmen take Borrow seriously as an authority on Wales or its current life. Beyond his sympathetic descriptions of scenery and despite his rather weird topography he hardly touches on it. His adventures are mainly with wayside oddities, gypsies, tramps, Irishmen, pig drivers and above all with innkeepers and waiters. He stumps on his whimsical and humorous way, handing out in his " atrocious Welsh " tags of Welsh history of which he knew very little and paralysing all and sundry with his apparently real knowledge of Welsh bards. Borrow learnt his Welsh from a Welsh groom of my wife's grandfather in Norwich to whom he was articled and whom he invokes with true Borrovian hyperbole. " My dear old master ! The finest solicitor in Norwich ! The finest solicitor in England ! The finest solicitor in the world ! " Borrow's English and American biographers and critics, when they come to Wild Wales, not knowing the country, miss the point of its delightful humours and whimsicalities, and underrate the book. Still I wonder what an ordinary tourist thinks of it when he buys a cheap edition off a bookstall and imagines he is getting a sort of guide to Wales !-
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