Eighteenth Century Writing From Wales by Sarah Prescott;

Author:Sarah Prescott;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Rolt focuses on the preservation of the Welsh language as a marker of the resilience of the plain British spirit in contrast to the great, yet vanished, culture and language of ‘Imperial ROME’. Although Rome possessed a language ‘fit for angels’, the Romans have lost ‘their native tongue divine’ (p. 26). In contrast, ‘uncorrupted, the GOMERIAN speech / Remains as in anterior ages, strong / Deep-cadenc’d, nervous, unimpair’d by time’ (pp. 26–7). In a similar vein to the satires, but used positively here, the Welsh language is seen as being in a virgin state, uncorrupted by outside influence, despite the many attempts (especially by the Normans) to eradicate it. Rolt does not dwell on the preservation of the Welsh language, but uses it as an introduction to the ways in which Cambria and her language – representative of true Britishness – are more resilient than Roman culture. Italy may have ‘olives, vineyards, and perennial spring’, but Cambria has ‘More useful blessings’ such as sheep and wool, and ‘welch frize’ (note to line 29, p. 27), well known to the Shrewsbury merchants. This national superiority extends to the far reaches of the globe: India may boast diamonds, but Wales produces coal to warm the hearth. Similarly, the orange groves of India are ‘trivial’ when ‘Compar’d with gnarled oaks, whose aged trunks / Thick spread the CAMBRIAN soil, to rib our fleets / And bear BRITANNIA’s thunders round the globe’ (p. 28). The ‘wholesome air’ of Cambria represents ‘kind humanity’ (p. 28), but also serves to back up Britain’s imperial expansion and naval supremacy. Wales is depicted by Rolt as a paradise of ‘wholesome’ nature, which adds a moral dimension to the pursuit of empire, epitomised by the gardens at Powys Castle, described as a Welsh version of ‘ELISIAN STOWE’ (p. 31). By its simplicity and symbolic value as a rural Horatian retreat, Wales purifies the pursuit of empire and dissociates modern Britons from the taint of Roman luxury: ‘Happy the man, approv’d, and blest by heav’n, / That in the sylvan shade shakes from his breast / The bait of folly, and the sting of vice’ (p. 33). As noted earlier, this emphasis on ‘the sylvan shade’ of the nation was popular in Anglo-British patriotic verse, and as Rolt moves more firmly into Opposition territory the poem becomes more closely aligned with British patriotic poetic traditions, although still approved and bolstered by Welsh examples and precedents. It could be argued that, in parts of Rolt’s poem, Wales serves to make modern Britons feel better about the state of the nation, as it represents the first and last innocent retreat from luxury and corruption. Although he appears to reject the most obvious model for British imperial ambition, the Roman Empire, through the focus on the liberty-loving Ancient Britons, Rolt nevertheless constructs an alternative defence of British empire based on (ironically enough) a view of Cambria as a place of virtuous Horatian simplicity.

The tensions inherent in trying to superimpose an eighteenth-century version of

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