’They make harsh songs; they note eight numbers.  On Monday they will be prying about.  On Tuesday they separate, angry with their adversaries.  On Wednesday they drink, enjoying themselves ostentatiously.  On Thursday they are in the choir; their poverty is disagreeable.  Friday is a day of abundance, the men are swimming in pleasures.  On Sunday, certainly, five legions and five hundreds of them, they pray, they make exclamations:  O Brithi, O Brithoi!  Like wood-cuckoos in noise they will be, every one of the idiots banging on the ground.’

As one reads Mr. Nash’s explanation and translation after Edward Davies’s, one feels that a flood of the broad daylight of common-sense has been suddenly shed over the Panegyric on Lludd the Great, and one is very grateful to Mr. Nash.

Or, again, when another Celt-lover, Mr. Herbert, has bewildered us with his fancies, as uncritical as Edward Davies’s; with his neo-Druidism, his Mithriac heresy, his Crist-celi, or man-god of the mysteries; and above all, his ape of the sanctuary, ’signifying the mercurial principle, that strange and unexplained disgrace of paganism,’ Mr. Nash comes to our assistance, and is most refreshingly rational.  To confine ourselves to the ape of the sanctuary only.  Mr. Herbert constructs his monster,—­to whom, he says, ’great sanctity, together with foul crime, deception, and treachery,’ is ascribed,—­out of four lines of old Welsh poetry, of which he adopts the following translation:-

’Without the ape, without the stall of the cow, without the mundane rampart, the world will become desolate, not requiring the cuckoos to convene the appointed dance over the green.’

One is not very clear what all this means, but it has, at any rate, a solemn air about it, which prepares one for the development of its first-named personage, the ape, into the mystical ape of the sanctuary.  The cow, too,—­says another famous Celt-lover, Dr. Owen, the learned author of the Welsh Dictionary,—­the cow (henfon) is the cow of transmigration; and this also sounds natural enough.  But Mr. Nash, who has a keen eye for the piecing which frequently happens in these old fragments, has observed that just here, where the ape of the sanctuary and the cow of transmigration make their appearance, there seems to come a cluster of adages, popular sayings; and he at once remembers an adage preserved with the word henfon in it, where, as he justly says, ’the cow of transmigration cannot very well have place.’  This adage, rendered literally in English, is:  ’Whoso owns the old cow, let him go at her tail;’ and the meaning of it, as a popular saying, is clear and simple enough.  With this clue, Mr. Nash examines the whole passage, suggests that heb eppa, ’without the ape,’ with which Mr. Herbert begins, in truth belongs to something going before and is to be translated somewhat differently; and, in short, that what we really have here is simply these three adages one after another:  ’The first share is the full one.  Politeness is natural, says the ape.  Without the cow-stall there would be no dung-heap.’  And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.