century; granted that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical activity in Wales, a time when the mediaeval literature flourished there, as it flourished in England, France, and other countries; granted that a great deal of what Welsh enthusiasts have attributed to their great traditional poets of the sixth century belongs to this later epoch,—­what then?  Does that get rid of the great traditional poets,—­the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and their compeers,—­does that get rid of the great poetical tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge the whole literary antiquity of Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or, at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance?  Mr. Nash says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth-century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in ad. 59, and never resuscitated.  ’At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads were composed, no tradition or popular recollection of the Druids or the Druidical mythology existed in Wales.  The Welsh bards knew of no older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the Christian world.’  And Mr. Nash complains that ’the old opinion that the Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a remote origin’ should still find promulgators; what we find in them is only, he says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth century, and one great mistake in these investigations has been the supposing that the Welsh of the twelfth, or even of the sixth century, were wiser as well as more Pagan than their neighbours.’

Why, what a wonderful thing is this!  We have, in the first place, the most weighty and explicit testimony,—­Strabo’s, Caesar’s, Lucan’s,—­that this race once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr. Nash’s words, ’wiser than their neighbours.’  Lucan’s words are singularly clear and strong, and serve well to stand as a landmark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on this side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely what they say, how much or how little; Lucan, addressing those hitherto under the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman civil war to their own devices, says:-

’Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains.  And ye, ye Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your barbaric rites and weird solemnities.  To you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest.  From you we learn, that the bourne of man’s ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below; in another world his spirit survives still;—­death, if your lore be true, is but the passage to enduring life.’