As I leaned against the wall, an elderly man came up and entered into discourse with me. He told me he was a barber by profession, had travelled all over Wales, and had seen London. I asked him about the chair of Rhys Goch. He told me that he had heard of some such chair a long time ago, but could give me no information as to where it stood. I know not how it happened that he came to speak about my landlady, but speak about her he did. He said that she was a good kind of woman, but totally unqualified for business, as she knew not how to charge. On my observing that that was a piece of ignorance with which few landladies or landlords either were taxable, he said that however other publicans might overcharge, undercharging was her foible, and that she had brought herself very low in the world by it - that to his certain knowledge she might have been worth thousands instead of the trifle which she was possessed of, and that she was particularly notorious for undercharging the English, a thing never before dreamt of in Wales.
I told him that I was very glad that I had come under the roof of such a landlady; the old barber, however, said that she was setting a bad example, that such goings on could not last long, that he knew how things would end, and finally working himself up into a regular tiff left me abruptly without wishing me good-night.
I returned to the inn, and called for lights; the lights were placed upon the table in the old-fashioned parlour, and I was left to myself. I walked up and down the room some time. At length, seeing some old books lying in a corner, I laid hold of them, carried them to the table, sat down and began to inspect them; they were the three volumes of Scott's "Cavalier" - I had seen this work when a youth, and thought it a tiresome trashy publication.
Looking over it now when I was grown old I thought so still, but Inow detected in it what from want of knowledge I had not detected in my early years, what the highest genius, had it been manifested in every page, could not have compensated for, base fulsome adulation of the worthless great, and most unprincipled libelling of the truly noble ones of the earth, because they the sons of peasants and handycraftsmen, stood up for the rights of outraged humanity, and proclaimed that it is worth makes the man and not embroidered clothing. The heartless, unprincipled son of the tyrant was transformed in that worthless book into a slightly-dissipated, it is true, but upon the whole brave, generous and amiable being; and Harrison, the English Regulus, honest, brave, unflinching Harrison, into a pseudo-fanatic, a mixture of the rogue and fool. Harrison, probably the man of the most noble and courageous heart that England ever produced, who when all was lost scorned to flee, like the second Charles from Worcester, but, braved infamous judges and the gallows, who when reproached on his mock trial with complicity in the death of the king, gave the noble answer that "It was a thing not done in a corner," and when in the cart on the way to Tyburn, on being asked jeeringly by a lord's bastard in the crowd, "Where is the good old cause now?" thrice struck his strong fist on the breast which contained his courageous heart, exclaiming, "Here, here, here!" Yet for that "Cavalier,"that trumpery publication, the booksellers of England, on its first appearance, gave an order to the amount of six thousand pounds.
But they were wise in their generation; they knew that the book would please the base, slavish taste of the age, a taste which the author of the work had had no slight share in forming.
Tired after a while with turning over the pages of the trashy "Cavalier" I returned the volumes to their place in the corner, blew out one candle, and taking the other in my hand marched off to bed.