First Sentence

"STANDING out like a bastion, rugged of mien, with its rock-bound shores, and formidable of aspect, with its frowning fastnesses, as it keeps sentry at the entrance to two Channels, in defiance of the tempests that sweep across the Atlantic, the south-western peninsula of Wales-known as the kingdom of Dyfed, in those remote times when Britain was severed into tribal divisions, but as the county of Pembroke in modern nomenclature-has filled as distinctive a place in the history of Wales as it has in its geography."