twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of
this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and
the interesting thing is to trace it. It cannot be denied that there
is such a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the
sixth century, Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth;
in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch
began, we hear of Rhys ap Tudor having 'brought with him from
Brittany the system of the Round Table, which at home had become
quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, with regard to
minstrels and bards, as it had been at Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the
Emperor Arthur, in the time of the sovereignty of the race of the
Cymry over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands.' Mr.
Nash's own comment on this is: 'We here see the introduction of the
Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation
the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;' and yet he does not
seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality, fulness,
and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is so
sceptical. Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive
literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of
Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.
Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing
about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time
as having in their possession 'ancient and authentic books' in the
Welsh language. The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again,
and the elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales
and Ireland, existing from the very commencement of the mediaeval
literary period in each, and to which no other mediaeval literature,
so far as I know, shows at its first beginnings anything similar,
indicates surely, in these Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent
tradition of an older poetical period of great development, and