Alexander of Macedon, 'we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the
Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance
into its present form. We may compare these statements of the
universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the
gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the
Traveller's Song.' No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to
have a common property in many marvellous stories. This is one of
the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern
science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each
people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of
theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special 'variety of
development,' which, to use Mr. Nash's own words, 'the formative
pressure of external circumstances' has occasioned; and not the
formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure
from within. It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in
a philosophic spirit wants to know. Where is the force, for
scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which
Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of
the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when
Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said
to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly? Where is
even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were
possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain
not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian
doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such
texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan: 'Three times must we
all die, before we come to our final repose'? or as the cry of the
eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry
in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the
solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh