into the greatest possible error. Granted that all the manuscripts
of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature which has
had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted that all such
manuscripts that we possess are, with the most insignificant
exception, not older than the twelfth 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