The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at
the thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful
orthographical usage that is at fault; the words, whose sound the
letters faithfully render, are music, and they largely record a
Christian civilization which was centuries old when the Saxons
came to drive the Britons into the western mountains and to call
them strangers in the immemorial home of their race. The Britons
of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the baffled Saxon
invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and poetry,
still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have
stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little
men, defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable
speech.
I
Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they
speak English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their
aspirates, which they lost under the Normans as the Saxons did.
But this did not happen to them by conquest as it did to the
Saxons; they were beguiled of their h's when they were cheated
with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh prince they were
promised in the succession of their ancient lines.
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