Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth centuries.  Whoever Arthur was—­the Arthur of that time,—­however great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western world.  No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic empire.  It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new life into it.  Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,—­to make it endure and inspire men as it did.  I think it is certain the Crest-Wave, —­a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to make life hum and the age important,—­was among the Welsh between 410 and 542.  The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center; and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius’ Gaul to Taliesin’s Wales, and from Tallesin’s Wales to Ireland.

Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what we can.  Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in a better condition than it has been since:—­remember the corn Julian brought thence to feed Gaul.  We must think of a large population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic, in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish Lowlands, and especially in Wales.  It was the former element, the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places, fought as soon as they felt the invaders’ pressure.  Wales itself had never been all held by the Romans.  The legions had covered the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts.  They had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona, establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in his day, strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains:  these regions also were held by Gaels.  But just south of those mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.

About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later the Scottish kingdom of history.  They also invaded Wales and England, and sent their fleets far and wide:  they were the ‘Picts and Scots’ of the history-books.  There seems also to have been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in the