the purely natural surroundings in which everything takes place.  A bishop figures at table beside Arthur, but his function is strictly limited to blessing the dishes.  The Irish saints, who at one time present themselves to give their benediction to Arthur and receive favours at his hands, are portrayed as a race of men vaguely known and difficult to understand.  No mediaeval literature held itself further removed from all monastic influence.  We evidently must suppose that the Welsh bards and story-tellers lived in a state of great isolation from the clergy, and had their culture and traditions quite apart.

The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the amiable serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay, ever in suspense between a smile and a tear.  We have in them the simple recital of a child, unwitting of any distinction between the noble and the common; there is something of that softly animated world, of that calm and tranquil ideal to which Ariosto’s stanzas transport us.  The chatter of the later mediaeval French and German imitators can give no idea of this charming manner of narration.  The skilful Chretien de Troyes himself remains in this respect far below the Welsh story-tellers, and as for Wolfram of Eschenbach, it must be avowed that the joy of the first discovery has carried German critics too far in the exaggeration of his merits.  He loses himself in interminable descriptions, and almost completely ignores the art of his recital.

What strikes one at a first glance in the imaginative compositions of the Celtic races, above all when they are contrasted with those of the Teutonic races, is the extreme mildness of manners pervading them.  There are none of those frightful vengeances which fill the Edda and the Niebelungen.  Compare the Teutonic with the Gaelic hero,—­Beowulf with Peredur, for example.  What a difference there is!  In the one all the horror of disgusting and blood-embrued barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the disinterested taste, if I may say so, for destruction and death; in the other a profound sense of justice, a great height of personal pride it is true, but also a great capacity for devotion, an exquisite loyalty.  The tyrannical man, the monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Lestrigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror by contrast with softer manners; they are almost what the wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality.  The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his purposeless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury.  The Cymric hero on the other hand, even in his wildest flights, seems possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy with the weakv.  Sympathy indeed is one of the deepest feelings among the Celtic peoples.  Even Judas is not denied a share of their pity.  St. Brandan found him upon a rock in the midst of the Polar seas; once a week he passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires of hell.  A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him, and tempers his sufferings.