with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear? What is
the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of
May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt? Who is the
mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year
with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place? These are no
mediaeval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
world. The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the
Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is
like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;-
-stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediaeval stories of no
Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the
Welsh. Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen,
asks help at the hand of Arthur's warriors; a list of these warriors
is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte
Guest's book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious
ruins:-

'Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham--(his domains were swallowed up by
the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and
his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there
no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came
over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of
this he died).

'Drem, the son of Dremidyd--(when the gnat arose in the morning with
the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as