Celtic peoples,—­ with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear?  What is the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?  Who is the mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place?  These are no mediaeval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;- -stones ‘not of this building,’ but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.  In the mediaeval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.  Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen, asks help at the hand of Arthur’s warriors; a list of these warriors is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte Guest’s book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious ruins:-

’Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham—­(his domains were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died).

’Drem, the son of Dremidyd—­(when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain).

’Kynyr Keinvarvawc—­(when he was told he had a son born, he said to his wife:  Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there will be no warmth in his hands).’

How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator’s hold upon the Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story!  How manifest the mixture of known and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders of tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a story whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time.  Bran invades Ireland, to avenge one of ’the three unhappy blows of this island,’ the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch, King of Ireland.  Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only seven men of Britain, ‘the Island of the Mighty,’ escape, among them Taliesin:-