In some respects, at
any rate, these documents are what they claim to be, they hold what
they pretend to hold, they touch that primitive world of which they
profess to be the voice. The true critic is he who can detect this
precious and genuine part in them, and employ it for the elucidation
of the Celt's genius and history, and for any other fruitful purposes
to which it can be applied. Merely to point out the mixture of what
is late and spurious in them, is to touch but the fringes of the
matter. In reliance upon the discovery of this mixture of what is
late and spurious in them, to pooh-pooh them altogether, to treat
them as a heap of rubbish, a mass of middle-age forgeries, is to fall
into the greatest possible error. Granted that all the manuscripts
of Welsh poetry (to take that branch of Celtic literature which has
had, in Mr. Nash, the ablest disparager), granted that all such
manuscripts that we possess are, with the most insignificant
exception, not older than the twelfth century; granted that the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of great poetical
activity in Wales, a time when the mediaeval literature flourished
there, as it flourished in England, France, and other countries;
granted that a great deal of what Welsh enthusiasts have attributed
to their great traditional poets of the sixth century belongs to this
later epoch,--what then? Does that get rid of the great traditional
poets,--the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen,
and their compeers,--does that get rid of the great poetical
tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge the whole
literary antiquity of Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or,
at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance? Mr.
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