islands.’  Mr. Nash’s own comment on this is:  ’We here see the introduction of the Arthurian romance from Brittany, preceding by nearly one generation the revival of music and poetry in North Wales;’ and yet he does not seem to perceive what a testimony is here to the reality, fulness, and subsistence of that primitive literature about which he is so sceptical.  Then in the twelfth century testimony to this primitive literature absolutely abounds; one can quote none better than that of Giraldus de Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, as he is usually called.  Giraldus is an excellent authority, who knew well what he was writing about, and he speaks of the Welsh bards and rhapsodists of his time as having in their possession ‘ancient and authentic books’ in the Welsh language.  The apparatus of technical terms of poetry, again, and the elaborate poetical organisation which we find, both in Wales and Ireland, existing from the very commencement of the mediaeval literary period in each, and to which no other mediaeval literature, so far as I know, shows at its first beginnings anything similar, indicates surely, in these Celtic peoples, the clear and persistent tradition of an older poetical period of great development, and almost irresistibly connects itself in one’s mind with the elaborate Druidic discipline which Caesar mentions.

But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediaeval documents which in Mr. Nash’s eyes pretty much begin and end with themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from such a tale as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the Mabinogion,—­that charming collection, for which we owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to call her still by the name she bore when she made her happy entry into the world of letters), and which she so unkindly suffers to remain out of print.  Almost every page of this tale points to traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.  Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall.  The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon.  ’But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.’  So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre.  The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.  ’But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was;’ and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.  ‘When first I came hither,’ says the Owl, ’the wide valley you see was a wooded glen.  And a race of men came and rooted it up.  And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third.