Holding to such firm preconceptions as these,—­and being in total ignorance of the fact that the Esoteric Wisdom was once universal, and therefore naturally the same with Pythagoras as with anyone else who had not lost it, whether he and the Druids had ever heard of each other or not,—­it becomes quite easy for my learned countryment to scout the idea that any such doctrine or system could have survived among the Britons until the fifth century, and revived then.  Yet Nennius, by the way, asserts that Vortigern (the king who called in the Saxons) had ‘Magi’ with him; which word in the Irish text appears as ‘Druids’:  and Canon MacCulloch himself speaks of this as evidence of a recrudescence of Druidism at that time.

With those quotations from the classical writers in view—­if with nothing else,—­I think we may call Reincarnation.... the characteristic doctrine of Druidism.  It so appeared to the Romans; it was that doctrine, which with themselves had been obscured by skepticism, worldliness, and the outwornness of their spiritual perceptions, that struck them as the most noteworthy, most surprising thing in Druidic teaching.  It stood in sharp contrast, too, with the beliefs of Christianity; so that, supposing it, and the system that taught it, had died during the Roman occupation of Britain, there really was nowhere from which it might have been regained.  Wales has been, until very recently, extraordinarily cut off from the currents of civilization and world-thought.  She has dwelt aloof among her mountains, satisfied with an interesting but exceedingly narrow little culture of her own.  You might almost say that from the time the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was hardly in Europe to flow in.  And yet this idea has curiously persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to our own day.  Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it from their elders; there was nothing new or unfamiliar about it to them; and this though nearly all Welsh folklore, even belief in the fairies, almost suffered extinction during the Religious Revivals of the eighteenth century and since.  They say the chapels frightened the fairies out of Wales; it is not quite true; but you can understand how wave after wave of fervid Calvinism would have dealt with a tradition like that of Reincarnation.  And yet echoes of it linger, and Dr. Wentz found them.  I myself remember hearing of a servant-girl from the mountains to whom her mistress (from whom I heard it) introduced the subject.  The girl expressed no surprise whatever:  indeed to goodness she shouldn’ wonder, so there; her father was a druid, miss, indeed and had told her about it when she was a child.

We have collateral evidence,—­in Nennius, I believe,—­for the existence of several famed poets among the Welsh at that time; and Tallesin’ is one of the names mentioned.  Seventy-seven poems come down ascribed to him:  I quoted some lines from one of them; here now are some line from another.  The child Taliesin is discovered in the court of Maelgwr Gwynedd, where he has confounded the bards with his magic; and is called forth to explain himself.  He does so in the following verses: