Last Saturday visited one of Llandudno's best kept secrets, the bookshop of Trystan and Llinos in Mostyn Street - Siop Lyfrau Lewis. There you can browse amongst the books, buy greetings cards, and enjoy refreshments in a laid-back ambiance. On the shelves was a book I'd never come across before, George Borrow's Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings - a collection of pieces forming a sort of appendix to Wild Wales. What particularly caught my eye was the chapters on the eighteenth-century Welsh poet Goronwy Owen - whom Borrow considered "the last of the great poets of Cambria, and with the exception of Ab Gwilym, the greatest which she has produced." Whether Goronwy would have been quite so complimentary about Borrow- who declares in Celtic Bards that Anglesey is as ugly an island as he had ever seen - is a moot point, because for the poet Anglesey was a sort of second Eden:

Henffych well, Fon, dirion dir,

Hyfrydwch pob rhyw frodir.

Goludog ac ail Eden

Dy sut, neu Baradwys hen..

Evidently Borrow had forgotten what he had written in chapter 33 of Wild Wales, where, looking out over Red Wharf Bay, he writes "I thought I had never beheld a more beautiful and tranquil scene."

Goronwy exerted a strong appeal for Borrow not just because he was a great poet, but because he was a swarthy Celtic outsider who looked like a gipsy - an Anglican parson, admittedly, but from a humble background, and continually denied advancement in the Church by small-minded, unsympathetic anglicising bishops with no appreciation of his genius. Small wonder that, like his fellow priest and poet, Evan Evans (Ieuan Brydydd Hir) he took to the bottle. Borrow uses the case history of Goronwy to underline a general point about what he calls "the crazy rage for gentility" - which he says (in Wild Wales) "will be the ruin of the Welsh". Borrow's loathing of gentility interestingly anticipates the loathing of Flaubert and Maupassant for the philistine bourgeoisie of nineteenth century France. And, for that matter, Tolstoy's similarly strong feelings, writing in the same decade as Borrow. Visiting Lucerne, Tolstoy had met a scruffy Tyrolean strolling player whom he invited to play under the windows of the hotel. When nobody threw any coins into his hat, Tolstoy invited the Tyrolean into the hotel and ordered champagne, much to the disgust of an Englishman and his wife who were eating mutton chops. Tolstoy began to write a story about it some days later.

Which is more civilized, which more of a barbarian: the lord who stamped away from the table in a huff at the sight of the singer's threadbare suit, who refused to pay him for his work with the millionth part of his fortune, and who now, after eating a hearty dinner, is sitting in a handsome, well-lighted room, calmly passing judgment on events in China and justifying the murders committed there [the Opium Wars?] or the little singer who has been out on the road for twenty years, with two sous in his pocket, risking prison, doing no harm to anyone, roaming over hill and dale, cheering people with his songs, and has now gone off, humiliated, almost driven away, tired, hungry and ashamed, to sleep in some nameless place on a heap of rotting straw?