Politeness is
natural, says the ape. Without the cow-stall there would be no dung-
heap.' And one can hardly doubt that Mr. Nash is quite right.
Even friends of the Celt, who are perfectly incapable of
extravagances of this sort, fall too often into a loose mode of
criticism concerning him and the documents of his history, which is
unsatisfactory in itself, and also gives an advantage to his many
enemies. One of the best and most delightful friends he has ever
had,--M. de la Villemarque,--has seen clearly enough that often the
alleged antiquity of his documents cannot be proved, that it can be
even disproved, and that he must rely on other supports than this to
establish what he wants; yet one finds him saying: 'I open the
collection of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century.
Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' . . . and so on. But his
adversaries deny that we have really any such thing as a 'collection
of Welsh bards from the sixth to the tenth century,' or that a
'Taliesin, one of the oldest of them,' exists to be quoted in defence
of any thesis. Sharon Turner, again, whose Vindication of the
Ancient British Poems was prompted, it seems to me, by a critical
instinct at bottom sound, is weak and uncritical in details like
this: 'The strange poem of Taliesin, called the Spoils of Annwn,
implies the existence (in the sixth century, he means) of
mythological tales about Arthur; and the frequent allusion of the old
Welsh bards to the persons and incidents which we find in the
Mabinogion, are further proofs that there must have been such stories
in circulation amongst the Welsh.
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