immediately became very popular. Quevedo has his Visions of the World,
of Death and her (sic) Empire, and of Hell; the same characters are
delineated in both, the same classes satirized, the same punishments
meted out. We read in both works of the catchpoles and wranglers, the
pompous knights and lying knaves--in fine, we cannot possibly come to any
other conclusion than that Ellis Wynne has "read, marked and inwardly
digested" L'Estrange's translation of Quevedo's Dreams. But admitting so
much, the Bardd Cwsc still remains a purely Welsh classic; whatever in
name and incident Ellis Wynne has borrowed from the Spaniard he has
dressed up in Welsh home-spun, leaving little or nothing indicative of
foreign influence. The sins he preached against, the sinners he
condemned, were, he knew too well, indigenous to Welsh and Spanish soil.
George Borrow sums up his comments upon the two authors in the following
words: "Upon the whole, the Cymric work is superior to the Spanish;
there is more unity of purpose in it, and it is far less encumbered with
useless matter."

The implication contained in the foregoing remarks of Borrow--that the
Bardd Cwsc is encumbered to a certain degree with useless matter, is no
doubt well founded. There is a tendency to dwell inordinately upon the
horrible, more particularly in the Vision of Hell; a tiring sameness in
the descriptive passages, an occasional lapse from the tragic to the
ludicrous, and an intrusion of the common-place in the midst of a speech
or a scene, marring the dignity of the one and the beauty of the other.

The most patent blemish, however, is the unwarranted coarseness of
expression to which the Author sometimes stoops. It is true that he must
be judged according to the times he lived in; his chief object was to
reach the ignorant masses of his countrymen, and to attain this object it
was necessary for him to adopt their blunt and unveneered speech. For