to our final repose’? or as the cry of the eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.  The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees:  ’I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.  I have been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have been a shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book in the beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half, I have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, I have been a shield in fight, I have been the string of a harp, I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of water.  There is nothing in which I have not been,’—­the question is, have these ’statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician’ nothing which distinguishes them from ’similar creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote;’ have they not an inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?  Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with the gleeman of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller’s Song.  Take the specimen of this song which Mr. Nash himself quotes:  ’I have been with the Israelites and with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and with the Myrgings.’  It is very well to parallel with this extract Taliesin’s:  ’I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I was on the horse’s crupper of Elias and Enoch; I was on the high cross of the merciful son of God; I was the chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my King in the manger of the ass; I supported Moses through the waters of Jordan; I have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity; it is not known what is the nature of its meat and its fish.’  It is very well to say that these assertions ’we may fairly ascribe to the poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thirteenth century.’  Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin’s assertions more especially; though one must remark at the same time that the Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon.  But Taliesin adds, after his:  ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,’ ’I was in the hall of Don before Gwydion was born;’ he adds, after:  ’I was chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,’ ’I have been three times