Nash
says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so
called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth-
century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and
pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the
Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all
this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never
resuscitated. 'At the time the Mabinogion and the Taliesin ballads
were composed, no tradition or popular recollection of the Druids or
the Druidical mythology existed in Wales. The Welsh bards knew of no
older mystery, nor of any mystic creed, unknown to the rest of the
Christian world.' And Mr. Nash complains that 'the old opinion that
the Welsh poems contain notices of Druid or Pagan superstitions of a
remote origin' should still find promulgators; what we find in them
is only, he says, what was circulating in Wales in the twelfth
century, and one great mistake in these investigations has been the
supposing that the Welsh of the twelfth, or even of the sixth
century, were wiser as well as more Pagan than their neighbours.'
Why, what a wonderful thing is this! We have, in the first place,
the most weighty and explicit testimony,--Strabo's, Caesar's,
Lucan's,--that this race once possessed a special, profound,
spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr.
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