M. de la Villemarque is also too ready to suppose that the people repeats for centuries songs that it only half understands.  When a song ceases to be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the people, with the end of approximating it to the sounds farmliar and significant to their ears.  Is it not also to be feared that in this case the editor, in entire good faith, may lend some slight inflection to the text, so as to find in it the sense that he desires, or has in his mind?]

The theme of the poetry of the bards of the sixth century is simple and exclusively heroic; it ever deals with the great motives of patriotism and glory.  There is a total absence of all tender feeling, no trace of love, no well-marked religious idea, but only a vague and naturalistic mysticism,—­a survival of Druidic teaching,—­ and a moral philosophy wholly expressed in Triads, similar to that taught in the half-bardic, half-Christian schools of St. Cadoc and St. Iltud.  The singularly artificial and highly wrought form of the style suggests the existence of a system of learned instruction possessing long traditions.  A more pronounced shade, and there would be a danger of falling into a pedantic and mannered rhetoric.  The bardic literature, by its lengthened existence through the whole of the Middle Ages, did not escape this danger.  It ended by being no more than a somewhat insipid collection of unoriginalities in style, and conventional metaphors. [Footnote:  A Welsh scholar, Mr. Stephens, in his History of Cymric Literature (Llandovery, 1849), has demonstrated these successive transformations very well.]

The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals itself in the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by many features of original and pathetic interest.  The strife which rent the soul of the old poets, their antipathy to the grey men of the monastery, their sad and painful conversion, are to be found in their songs.  The sweetness and tenacity of the Breton character can alone explain how a heterodoxy so openly avowed as this maintained its position in face of the dominant Christianity, and how holy men, Kolumkill for example, took upon themselves the defence of the bards against the kings who desired to stamp them out.  The strife was the longer in its duration, in that Christianity among the Celtic peoples never employed force against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to the vanquished the liberty of ill humour.  Belief in prophets, indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of faith the Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his acceptance by the whole of Europe.  Gildas and the orthodox Bretons were ceaseless in their thunderings against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias and Samuel, two bards who only foretold good; even in the twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis saw a prophet in the town of Caerleon.