resident in the Castle of Arianrod;’ he adds, after:  ’I was at the cross with Mary Magdalene,’ ’I obtained my Inspiration from the cauldron of Ceridwen.’  And finally, after the mediaeval touch of the visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at score:  ’I have been instructed in the whole system of the universe; I shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the earth.  I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round without motion between three elements.  Is it not the wonder of the world that cannot be discovered?’ And so he ends the poem.  But here is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem:  it is here that the ‘formative pressure’ has been really in operation; and here surely is paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with.  It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash does.  Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage its real significance.

I say, then, what we want is to know the Celt and his genius; not to exalt him or to abase him, but to know him.  And for this a disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.  Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.  His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism, and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.

Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their lives, the Celt and sound criticism together.  The Celtic grammar of Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive characteristic of Germany.  Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book.  The only desire apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the Celtic peoples, as it really is.  In this he stands as a model to Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and which no one had so established before.  People talked at random of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age of what we actually have of these writings.  To take the