tions, and part of the Avallenau, with a more literal prose translation by Mr. Edward Williams. He was likewise assisted in his work by Dr. W. Owen, afterwards Dr. Owen Pughe, who, a few years afterwards, published five of the poems of Taliessin in the Gentleman's Magazine for the years 1789 and 1790, being the Ode to Gwallawg, the Death-Song of Owen, the Battle of Dyffryn Garant, the Battle of Gwenystrad, and the Gorchan Cynvelyn, with English translations. These translations, however, were too diffuse and too much tainted by a desire to give the passages a mystic meaning, to convey a fair idea of the real nature of the poems.

In 1792, Dr. Owen Pughe published The Heroic Elegies, and other pieces of Llywarch Hen, with a much more literal English version. The work contains a pretty complete collection of the poems attributed to Llywarch Hen, but it is not said from what MS. the text was printed, while the notes contain collations with the Black Book of Caermarthen and the Red Book of Hergest.*

At length, in the year 1801, the text of the whole of these poems was given to the world, through the munificence of Owen Jones, a furrier in Thames Street,

* It is remarkable that there is no reference to readings in the Llyfr du in the poems which are actually to be found there, while in six poems which are not in the Black Book, the foot of the page is full of references to the Llyfr du for various readings. These various readings, so far as I have been able to judge, correspond with the Red Book of Hergest, while those attributed to the Llyfr coch are not to be found there.

London, who, in that and subsequent years, published the Myvyrian Archaeology of Wales, containing the chief productions of Welsh literature. He was assisted by Mr. Edward Williams of Glamorgan and Dr. Owen Pughe; but though the text of almost all of these poems is given, it is not said from what particular MSS. they were printed, and no materials are afforded for discriminating between what are probably old and what are spurious. The text is unaccompanied by translations.

If the publication of the poems of Ossian thus drew attention to these ancient Welsh poems, the controversy which followed on the poems drew forth an able vindication of the genuine character of the latter. Sharon Turner, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, the first edition of which appeared in 1799, founded upon some of these poems as historical documents. He quoted the Death-Song of Geraint as containing the account of a real battle at Longporth, or Portsmouth, between Cerdic, the founder of the kingdom of Wesser, and the Britons. He referred to the poems of Taliessin on the battles of Argoed Llwyfain and Gwenystrad as real history, and he considered the great poem of the Gododin by Aneurin as describing a real war between the Britons and the Angles of Ida's kingdom. This drew upon him the criticism of the two chief opponents of the claims of Ossian-viz. John Pinkerton and Malcolm Laing-who declared that these Welsh poems were equally unworthy of credit. In consequence of this attack,

Turner published, in 1803, his Vindication of the genuineness of the ancient British poems of Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, and Myrddin. In this elaborate essay he endeavoured to demonstrate two propositions -- First, That these four bards were real men, and actually lived in the sixth century; and, secondly, that, with some exceptions, the poems attributed to them are their genuine works. He dealt, however, with the historical poems alone as sufficient for his purpose, and did not enter into any critical analysis of the poems as a whole. This vindication was, in the main, considered to be conclusive as to the poems being the genuine works of the bards whose name they bore; and it appeared to be now generally accepted as a fact, that a body of genuine poetry, of the sixth century, existed in the Welsh language, which threw light upon the history of that century.

A new view was, however, soon taken of their real meaning; and some years after, the Rev. Edward Davies brought out, in his work called the Mythology of the British Druids, published in 1809, his theory that there was handed down in these poems a system of mythology which had been the religion of the Druids in the pagan period, and was still professed in secret by the bards, their genuine successors. The Gododin, he endeavoured to show by an elaborate translation, related to the traditionary history of the massacre of the Britons by the Saxons at Stonehenge, called the Plot of the Long Knives; and he appended to his work a number of the poems of Taliessin, with

translations to show the mystic meaning which pervaded them. This theory was still further elaborated by the Honourable Algernon Herbert, in two works published anonymously: Britannia after the Romans, in 1836; and The Neo-Druidic Heresy, in 1838. He took the same view with regard to the meaning of the Gododin; and he combined with much ingenious and wild speculation regarding the post-Roman history of Britain, the theory that a lurking adherence to the old paganism of the Druids had caused a schism in the British church, and that the bards, under the name of Christians and the guise of Christian nomenclature, professed in secret a paganism as an esoteric cult, which he denominated the Neo-Druidic heresy, and which he maintained was obscurely hinted at in the poems of Taliessin. It would probably be difficult to find a stranger specimen of perverted ingenuity and misplaced learning than is contained in the works of Davies and Herbert; but the urgency with which they maintained their views, and the disguise under which the poems appeared in their so-called translations, certainly produced an impression that the poems of Taliessin did contain a mystic philosophy, while, at the same time, the Gododin of Aneurin and the poems of Llywarch Hen were generally recognised as genuine historical documents commemorating real historical events.

The Rev. John Williams, afterwards Archdeacon of Cardigan, an eminent Welsh scholar, and a man of much talent, announced, in 1841, a translation of the poems of Aneurin, Taliessin, and other primitive bards,

with a critical revision and re-establishment of the text; but, although these poems had occupied a large share of his attention, I believe he never seriously prepared the materials for his edition, and he died in 1858, without having done anything towards carrying it out. I have frequently heard him give as a reason the great difficulty involved, and time and labour required, "in restoring the genuine text." What he meant by this we can see in the last work he published, termed Gomer, where (part ii. p. 33 et seq.), we have several specimens of how he meant to deal with the text. His plan obviously was to restore the orthography of the words from the existing text in the Myvyrian Archæology to what he conceived must have been their form when the respective poems were composed. His mind, too, appears to have been influenced in no slight degree by the school of Davies, and he was too ready to attach a mystic meaning to the text. In 1850, some time before the Archdeacon's death, a learned Breton, the Vicomte de la Villemarqué, published his Poemes des Bardes Bretons du VI. Siecle, traduits pour la premiere fois, avec le texte en regard revu sur les plus anciens manuscrits; and he, too, proceeded upon the same idea of restoring the original text. In his preface, after noticing the oldest copies of the poems, which he says formed the basis of his edition, he adds,

Apres le travail de collation, il restait a reproduire les textes avec l'orthographe convenable, mais la quelle suivre ;" and he fixes upon the Breton orthography as the most ancient, and in this, which he