“Far in a hollow glade of Mona’s woods,”

and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she

                “—­loved to lie
    Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar
    Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old.”

Mason’s “Caractacus” (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with a chorus of British bards, and a principal Druid for choragus.  The scene is the sacred grove in Mona.  Mason got up with much care the description of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius.  Joseph Warton commends highly the chorus on “Death” in this piece, as well as the chorus of bards at the end of West’s “Institution of the Garter.”  For the materials of his “Bard” Gray had to go no farther than historians and chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of whom he refers.  Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the murder of his brothers in song.

But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans’ “Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh.  The most considerable of these was “The Triumphs of Owen,” published among Gray’s collected poems in 1768.  This celebrates the victory over the confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, “the dragon son on Mona.”  The other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise of fallen heroes:  “Caradoc,” “Conan,” and “The Death of Hoel.”  They were printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764.

The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in 1758, when “Caractacus” was still in the works, takes him to task for mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies.  He instructs him that Woden and his Valhalla belong to “the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the Bards”; but admits that, “in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor under,” it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, “dropping, however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins,” and “without entering too minutely on particulars”; or “still better, to graft any wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one’s own invention, upon the Druid stock.”  But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in “The Bard,” thereby incurring Dr. Johnson’s censure.  “The weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in another mythology.  Theft is always dangerous:  Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a fiction outrageous