of a pagan mythology.’  He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Caesar.  He is very severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this country, who has already furnished several contributions to our knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit has, I believe, not yet been given us,—­Mr. Meyer.  He is very severe upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin, ’a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of god of the Sun.’  It is not for me to pronounce for or against this notion of Mr. Meyer’s.  I have not the knowledge which is needed in order to make one’s suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer’s theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial.  But that any one who knows the set of modern mythological science towards astronomical and solar myths, a set which has already justified itself in many respects so victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth;—­that any one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no traces of mythology, is quite astounding.  Why, the heroes and heroines of the old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story; Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra; Cassiopeia’s chair is Llys Don, Don’s Court; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don’s son, and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion.  With Gwydion is Math, the son of Mathonwy, the ‘man of illusion and phantasy;’ and the moment one goes below the surface,—­almost before one goes below the surface,—­all is illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological import, in the world which all these personages inhabit.  What are the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound for eighty years together listening to them?  What is the Avanc, the water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition?  What is Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first day of May,—­the great feast of the sun among the