ively original; and we have chosen
the portrait of Olwen from the second of these for our selections, to
show the art and charm of the Welsh romancers in the Middle Ages.

If the 'Mabinogion' are fine as prose, we have an equally fine
expression of this time in poetry, in the poems of Rhys Goch ab
Rhicert (Rhys the Red, son of Rhicert) and the ever delightful Dafydd
ab Gwilym, who will be found treated separately. After Dafydd, Welsh
poetry was to enter upon a new phase, not fortunate even in its
immediate effects, disastrous in its ultimate ones. It was in the
fourteenth century that Welsh prosody, always intricate, finally waxed
proud, so to speak, of its complexity, and formed for itself a
hide-bound code which was to become the bugbear of Welsh poetry in the
following centuries. To give any adequate account of its complexities
of technique and the whole letter of its syntax would require a long
and tedious treatise in itself. Enough to say that the underlying
principle was that of what is termed in Welsh "Eynghanedd," or
"consonancy"; by which rhymes within rhymes and echoes within echoes
of certain dominant syllables were insisted upon arbitrarily, until
almost every word in every line was subject to a rigid and invincible
rule. Art for art, insisted upon in this way, could only end in
conventionalizing the very thing it was meant to assist.

Poetry, too carefully nursed and housed, thus fell into a bad way; but
luckily meanwhile a new literature was to begin for Wales, along quite
other lines, with the Reformation. The translation of the Bible into
Welsh by Bishop Morgan in the sixteenth century marks an epoch in the
life of the Welsh people and their literature. Therewith the history
of the princes and the great lords ends, and the history of the
people--and a people mainly peasant, let us remark--begins. Its
profound moral force apart, and judged purely as a literary force, the
Bible, admirably and idiomatically translated, had an incalculable
effect. It set a fine and high and yet simple standard of prose, much
as the English Bible does; and taught the possibilities of his tongue
to the poorest Welsh peasant. One finds its influence strong in almost
every prose work of any note published in the last three centuries,
and in a great proportion of the poetry. It did more than anything of
later time to save the language; and here is the simple explanation
of the extraordinary difference between the fortunes of the