My wings, are they not withered stumps?’ Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be guide ’to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’  The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.  He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was a monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who might, perhaps, tell them something of him.  And at last the Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon.  ’With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.’  And the Salmon took Arthur’s messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of the prison in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.

Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediaeval antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they may have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an acceptance of Mr. Nash’s doctrine,—­in some respects very salutary,—­ ’that the common assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.’  It is true, it has; it is true, too, that, as he goes on to say, ’writers who claim for productions actually existing only in manuscripts of the twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called upon to demonstrate the links of evidence, either internal or external, which bridge over this great intervening period of at least five hundred years.’  Then Mr. Nash continues:  ’This external evidence is altogether wanting.’  Not altogether, as we have seen; that assertion is a little too strong.  But I am content to let it pass, because it is true, that without internal evidence in this matter the external evidence would be of no moment.  But when Mr. Nash continues further:  ’And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims to an origin in the sixth century,’ and leaves the matter there, and finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter; because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.

So again with the question as to the mythological import of these poems.  Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,—­ often enough chimerical,—­than in the spirit of a disinterested man of science.  ’We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh language no traces,’ he says, ’of the Druids, or