harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of
western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable
means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a
developement of the old Celtic language heard by Cæsar as the Romance
tongues are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than
any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure
and to settled literary form. No other mediæval literature shows at its
outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.
But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling
freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into
a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the
strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic
tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.


[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry]

The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact,
tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When
Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent
into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediæval horror with
the mediæval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends his
years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with
fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy, a new
earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken
by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's
armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright with
glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk,
and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious
emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the