course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which reigned till the Edwardian Conquest.  It is pretty safe to say that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in vigor than the Saxon incomers.  And as we saw in the first of these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.

But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped, remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes.  To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy far-off things,—­unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;—­ but grandiose.  Titanic vague figures loom up:  Arthur, the type of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin, type of magicians.  Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the Morte D’Arthur; and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the Idylls. The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles.  There is a sense of being on the brink of the world; with the ’arm clothed in white samite’ reaching in from a world beyond,—­that Otherworld to which the wounded Arthur, barge-borne over the nightly waters by the Queens of Faerie, went to heal him of his wounds, and to await the cyclic hour for his retum.  He is the symbol of—­what shall we say?—­civilization, culture, or the spiritual sources of these, the light that alone can keep them sweet and wholesome; that light has died from the broken Roman world, and passes now west-ward through the Gates of the Sunset:  through Wales, through Ireland, the Laya-Center; into the Hidden, the Place of the Spirit; into Avallon, which is Ynys Afallen, the ’Isle of Apple-trees’;—­whence to return in its time:—­Rex quondam, rexque futurus.

There is a poem by Myrddin Gwyllt, traditionally of the sixth century, about that Garth of Apple-trees; which he will have a secret place in the Woods of Celyddon, the Occult Land, and not an island in the sea at all; and in this poem it has always seemed to me that one gets a clue to the real and interesting things of history.  He claims in it to be the last of the white-robed Guardians of the Sacred Tree, the fruit of which none of the black-robed,—­no ’son of a monk,’—­shall ever enjoy.  There has been a battle, in which the true order of the world has gone down; but there Myrddin stays to guard the ‘Tree’ against the