And now, along with this testimony of Lucan's, one has to carry in
mind Caesar's remark, that the Druids, partly from a religious
scruple, partly from a desire to discipline the memory of their
pupils, committed nothing to writing. Well, then come the crushing
defeat of the Celtic race in Britain and the Roman conquest; but the
Celtic race subsisted here still, and any one can see that, while the
race subsisted, the traditions of a discipline such as that of which
Lucan has drawn the picture were not likely to be so very speedily
'extinguished.' The withdrawal of the Romans, the recovered
independence of the native race here, the Saxon invasion, the
struggle with the Saxons, were just the ground for one of those
bursts of energetic national life and self-consciousness which find a
voice in a burst of poets and poetry. Accordingly, to this time, to
the sixth century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great
group of British poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth
century there began for Wales, along with another burst of national
life, another burst of poetry; and this burst LITERARY in the
stricter sense of the word,--a burst which left, for the first time,
written records. It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well
as of itself, and therefore Mr.
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