Cylchgronau Cymru

franchise to be reformed, but in the meantime he was prepared to use patronage to achieve the most desirable situation in the circumstances. The mini saga over this issue, which is uncovered in the correspondence, reveals that pragmatic dimension in Price's thought and conduct which can, as D. O. Thomas has argued elsewhere, be discerned in Price's published works. This is a very different Richard Price from that of Edmund Burke's hostile portrayal in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which has coloured views of Price since then. Reading Price's correspondence, seeing the proof of his intellectual modesty and of his eminence, of his sensitivity to circumstance, of his status as a defender of liberty and of his immense reputation in the world of the late Enlightenment, does indeed help one to understand the ferocity of Burke's attack on him. It would hardly have been necessary if Price were a minor luminary. In his correspondence we see not Burke's caricature of Price as a narrow minded but dangerously calculating divine, but the man as he was: a man of integrity and of intellectual courage, who was constantly putting himself out for others, whose devotion to duty placed considerable strains and anxieties on him, and whose clear conception of the world as it ought to be led him to champion causes and assume a public role which in many respects he would have preferred to eschew. It is small wonder that he was so widely revered in his own lifetime and so deeply mourned when he died. The publication of Price's correspondence is therefore helping us to recover the whole man and, in so doing. to set the historical record straight. MARTIN FITZPATRICK Aberystwyth A LAND OF PURE DELIGHT: SELECTIONS FROM THE LETTERS OF THOMAS JOHNES OF HAFOD, CARDIGANSHIRE (1748-1816). Edited by Richard J. Moore-Colyer. Gomer Press, Llandysul, 1992. Pp. xi, 314. £ 15.95. As the jacket of this book tells us, Thomas Johnes was 'one of the most remarkable Welshmen of his generation', a claim that is fully justified by Richard Moore-Colyer's fascinating account of him. Johnes was exceptionally fortunate in inheriting not only the Hafod estate but also lands in south Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire acquired by his grandfather. Thomas Johnes of Penybont, and the extensive property of Croft Castle in Herefordshire. And when he first married, in 1779, he gained a further income of £ 2,000 a year, together with a life interest in his wife's Monmouthshire property Ample resources enabled Johnes to pursue his personal interests rather than assume the task of building up a great territorial estate. In particular, when he inherited Hafod on the death of his father in 1780, Johnes embarked on a large-scale and expensive programme of rebuilding with the object of creating a magnificent example of the fashionable picturesque.