The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr; Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd; But unknown is the grave of Arthur.

That comes from the Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors, and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as of its opposite):-

Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain,
Till God did please Death should me seize
And ease me of my pain —

if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which in their Gemeinheit of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.

Or take this epitaph of an Irish Celt, Angus the Culdee, whose Felire, or festology, I have already mentioned; a festology in which, at the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century, he collected from ‘the countless hosts of the illuminated books of Erin’ (to use his own words) the festivals of the Irish saints, his poem having a stanza for every day in the year.  The epitaph on Angus, who died at Cluain Eidhnech, in Queen’s County, runs thus:-

Angus in the assembly of Heaven,
Here are his tomb and his bed;
It is from hence he went to death,
In the Friday, to holy Heaven.

It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was rear’d;
It was in Cluain Eidhnech he was buried;
In Cluain Eidhnech, of many crosses,
He first read his psalms.

That is by no eminent hand; and yet a Greek epitaph could not show a finer perception of what constitutes propriety and felicity of style in compositions of this nature.  Take the well-known Welsh prophecy about the fate of the Britons:-

Their Lord they will praise,
Their speech they will keep,
Their land they will lose,
Except wild Wales.

To however late an epoch that prophecy belongs, what a feeling for style, at any rate, it manifests!  And the same thing may be said of the famous Welsh triads.  We may put aside all the vexed questions as to their greater or less antiquity, and still what important witness they bear to the genius for literary style of the people who produced them!

Now we English undoubtedly exhibit very often the want of sense for style of our German kinsmen.  The churchyard lines I just now quoted afford an instance of it:  but the whole branch of our literature,—­ and a very popular branch it is, our hymnology,—­to which those lines are to be referred, is one continued instance of it.  Our German kinsmen and we are the great people for hymns.  The Germans are very proud of their hymns, and we are very proud of ours; but it is hard to say which of the two, the German hymn-book or ours, has least poetical worth in itself, or does least to prove genuine poetical power in the