those old monkish lines which in the cathedral of Canterbury forms the legend of one of those works of ecclesiastical decoration which represents the great prophet and lawgiver of the Jews feeding Jethro's sheep:

MOSES SERVAT OVES SIC CHRISTUM SIGNIFICAVIT.

INAUGURAL ADDRESS

AT THE OPENING OF THE NEW MUSEUM OF THE

POWYSLAND CLUB, WELSHPOOL.

Monday, October 5th, 1874.

THE Powysland Club was established at Welshpool for the purpose of promoting the educational and social well-being of the young men of the district. The Earl of Powis filled the office of president, and the following address, which is copied from The Oswestry Advertiser, was delivered in his capacity of president on the opening of the new museum which had just been erected :—

Ladies and Gentlemen, before I move the adoption of the report which has just been read, I must congratulate you on the plan of this new museum. It is a great thing for an institution like this to have a freehold and possession of its own-a local habitation and a name. Mr. Disraeli, in one of his amusing works, tells us that it is from our territorial constitution that every class of Englishmen desires to possess somewhere or other a freehold, and surely that which is an object of ambition to each of us individually is equally a laudable object of ambition to a collective body. Besides, the sight of a building permanently the property of the Society like this, and not subject

to the casualties of yearly tenancy, is a great fact in making those who have curiosities willing to deposit them for the public benefit, and to take pride in contributing something to illustrate the antiquities and the bygone history of the district with which they are connected.

The

I confess that I was most agreeably surprised when I came here to-day to see what a handsome room we had got, so much through the energy of Mr. Morris Jones, to whom, both in the acquisition of the site and in the construction of the building, this Society is under the greatest obligations. The small and modest cottage is so overtopped and overshadowed by the new building annexed to it, that it reminds me of the controversy in Sheridan's trip to Scarborough between the man of fashion and the shoemaker. man of fashion says that in former days the shoe was larger than the buckle, but according to the practice which had then come in vogue the buckle was of greater importance and larger than the shoe, and the only earthly use of the shoe was to keep on the buckle. The parallel may be carried out in this case, for I imagine the only use of the cottage will be to look after the museum. Such a display as we have to-day is most useful, because the study and the collection of antiquities may be called the practical part of history. The study of different articles like these, the sight of a museum such as this and of its contents, strike the eye, appeal to the mind, and enable us to realise bygone things in a manner in which no merely oral description or lecture on history,

or even the reading of history, could produce. It is the more necessary that we, as Welshmen, should study and take care of these relics of the past, because the history of Wales as a nation is of the past. It is inevitable that it should be so. When a small nation unites its fate to that of a larger one, it becomes merged in the greater body. It is not therefore destroyed, any more than the smaller river, which mingles its waters with the greater on the way to the ocean, is destroyed; the Isis becomes the Thames, even the Severn submits to be called the Avon, and the Ilissus, too, loses its identity on its way to the Mediterranean without repining or thinking that this was otherwise than following the course of nature. It is very striking, in the case of the Ilissus, that it owes its fame to the great body of the Greeks, to that nation which founded its greatness by destroying the realm of Troy, but even it gave, through the works of Homer, immortality to the town which had been destroyed; immortality which otherwise it never would have obtained.

Looking at our position as Welshmen we naturally contrast our contented union with Great Britain with our neighbours across the water. As Mr. Disraeli said this year, Ireland will be conquered; if Ireland were not always reminding us that she has been. conquered, we should have forgotten all about it long ago.

Now I think it is a great misfortune when a nation persists in taking what may be called the cantankerous view in politics. It prevents the lesser enjoying the benefits of union with the greater;

it prevents the fusion of races, which is the greatest source of strength to the nation. It is not more a matter of regret or disgrace that the Welsh should submit to the English than it was to the Saxons to have their institutions modified by the Danes, and then to have the great feudal system of William and his Norman barons dominating for so many years and changing the constitution of the country. Well, the sober-minded, practical, progressive English fused all those elements together, but so far from desiring to efface the memory of the past, so far from desiring to treat the history of the Normans as that of national. dishonour, they kept to the old language in technical and formal matters long after Norman French had ceased to be the language of any class of the community, and at the present day when the Queen, the sovereign not merely of these three kingdoms, but of great territories in every quarter of the globe, gives her assent to the Acts of Parliament she does it in the same words in which the first or second Edward, in the early days of the constitutiou, signified his assent to the enactments of the early Parliaments, and says "La Reyne le veult." Chronic jarring between two nations incapacitates both, stops their making the best of things. Irritation on the one side breeds a corresponding irritation on the other, and prevents the larger nation from establishing cordial relations and from fully benefiting the small one. It prevents the small one from taking advantage of the predominant position of its neighbour. The small nation united to a large one must of necessity