themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims
to an origin in the sixth century,' and leaves the matter there, and
finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to
the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter;
because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what
instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to
a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and
what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.

So again with the question as to the mythological import of these
poems. Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in
the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,--
often enough chimerical,--than in the spirit of a disinterested man
of science. 'We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh
language no traces,' he says, 'of the Druids, or of a pagan
mythology.' He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these
compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls,
attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Caesar. He is very
severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this
country, who has already furnished several contributions to our
knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit
has, I believe, not yet been given us,--Mr. Meyer. He is very severe
upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin,
'a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of
god of the Sun.' It is not for me to pronounce for or against this
notion of Mr. Meyer's. I have not the knowledge which is needed in
order to make one's suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking
merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory
seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer's theories, a somewhat excessive
part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying