very prone to ascribe to barbarous people an ideal purity and
simplicity of life and manners, are by no means naturally inclined to
ascribe to them high attainment in intellectual and spiritual things.
And now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has to carry in
mind Caesar's remark, that the Druids, partly from a religious
scruple, partly from a desire to discipline the memory of their
pupils, committed nothing to writing. Well, then come the crushing
defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Roman conquest; but the
Celtic race subsisted here still, and any one can see that, while the
race subsisted, the traditions of a discipline such as that of which
Lucan has drawn the picture were not likely to be so very speedily
'extinguished.' The withdrawal of the Romans, the recovered
independence of the native race here, the Saxon invasion, the
struggle with the Saxons, were just the ground for one of those
bursts of energetic national life and self-consciousness which find a
voice in a burst of poets and poetry. Accordingly, to this time, to
the sixth century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great
group of British poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth
century there began for Wales, along with another burst of national
life, another burst of poetry; and this burst LITERARY in the
stricter sense of the word,--a burst which left, for the first time,
written records. It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well
as of itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the real author
of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as
its own. No doubt one cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the
sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth and
succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and changed
it a great deal in writing it down. But, since a continuous stream
of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the
kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the