Bangor is a forbidding place—a squalid and uninteresting mile-length of street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor, climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone. The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866 to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here, has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.

Doctor Johnson, who, touring North Wales in 1774, found the “quire” of Bangor to be “mean,” could quite honestly repeat that criticism to-day. The service in his time was also “ill-read.” A “very mean inn” in the town further helped to jaundice his views—an inn with little accommodation, for he records: “I lay in a room where the other bed had two men.”

De Quincey is one of the very many who have not liked Bangor. He says it has “fewer attractions than any other spot in Carnarvonshire”—a very mild and negative way of putting Bangor’s disabilities, and much milder than it might have been, considering the provocation received. It was in 1802 he was here, following his “elopement” from school at Manchester. With the weekly allowance of a guinea, he was free for a while to roam Wales as he pleased, and came (of all places!) to Bangor, where he hired “a very miniature set of apartments—one room and a closet.” His landlady had been a servant in the household of the Bishop of Bangor, and, one day, calling at the Palace, happened to mention to the Bight Reverend how she had let her rooms. Thereupon that dignified cleric thought it incumbent upon him to caution her as to her selection of inmates. “You must recollect, Betty,” he said, “that Bangor is the high road to the Head (the Head was the common colloquial expression for Holyhead); so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into England; and of English swindlers, running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”

This was excellent advice for judicious ears; but Betty unhappily repeated the Bishop’s words to De Quincey, together with her reply, which was, “Oh, my lord, I really don’t think this young gentleman is a swindler, because——” But the clause that was to have justified him that young gentleman never knew. “You don’t think me a swindler,” he interposed; “I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it”; and so departed, in a righteous fury.