eries in the reign of Henry
VIII. it was presented by the treasurer of that church to Sir John
Price, one of the king's commissioners, and from him it passed
eventually into the hands of Sir Robert Vaughan, the owner of the famous
Hengwrt collection. It is now among the Peniarth Manuscripts,
undoubtedly the most valuable collection of Welsh manuscripts in the
United Kingdom. The second manuscript is the _Book of Aneirin_, a small
quarto manuscript of nineteen leaves of vellum, written about 1250. It
was at one time in the possession of Sir Thomas Phillips of Middlehill,
and now belongs to the free library of the city of Cardiff. The third is
the _Book of Taliessin_, in the Hengwrt and subsequently in the Peniarth
collection. It is a small quarto manuscript containing thirty-eight
leaves, written in Gothic letters, about the early part of the 14th
century. The fourth manuscript, and in some respects the most important,
is the _Red Book of Hergest_, so called from Hergest Court, one of the
seats of the Vaughans. It is a folio volume of 360 leaves written by
different hands between the beginning of the 14th and the middle of the
15th century. This manuscript, which is the most extensive compilation
of the medieval prose and verse of Wales, is now in the possession of
Jesus College, Oxford, and is kept in the Bodleian Library of that
university. The main body of the poems contained in these four MSS. was
printed by W. F. Skene with a tentative English version in his _Four
Ancient Books of Wales_.

The other Welsh manuscripts, ranging down from the 15th to the 18th
century, are far too numerous to notice, and it is outside the scope of
this article to deal minutely with the original sources of the text of
Welsh writings.

We will now only endeavour to sketch the history of Welsh literature
from these early centuries down to our own times, and to show how the
Celtic people of Wales have developed a literature true to their own
genius, and how that literature stands to this day both a minister to
the culture of the Welsh people and a sure indication of it.

Gildas

1. _Early Latin Writers._--The works now known as those of Gildas (q.v.)
and Nennius (q.v.) are written in Latin; they throw considerable light
on the origin of Welsh romantic literature and on the history of the
earlier poems. Gildas was born at Ailclyd, the modern Dumbarton, that
part of Britain which is called by Welsh writers _Y Gogledd_, or the
North.