oneth, we
come to distinctly modern times. He is hardly a great poet, if we judge
him by the canons which are now popular. His gift was a gift of terse
and biting statement, and his _cywyddau_ on the whole have more of
literary than of poetical merit. He was a man of vast learning, and his
works are full of scholastic and often difficult allusions. His most
famous _cywyddau_ are those written in the literary quarrel between him
and Wiliam Cynwal. "Wiliam Cynwal," says Goronwy Owen, "though the
greater poet, was like a man fighting with bare fists against complete
armour," and it may be freely granted that in this, the most famous
quarrel in Welsh literature, the palm of victory rested with the
contentious old ecclesiastic. We shall deal with the rest of Edmwnd
Prys's literary work in the section on the rise of popular poetry.

Here the age of the _cywydd_ and the _awdl_, as the chief forms of
verse, ends. They appear again in the succeeding centuries, but as
aliens among a nation that no longer paid them homage. The distinctly
Welsh fashion in song was dying out.

6. _Prose, 1550-1750._--One of the most striking features of Welsh
literature is the almost entire absence of prose between 1300 and 1550.
The genius of the people has always been an eminently poetical and
imaginative one, and the history of Wales, politically and socially, has
always been a fitter subject for poetry than for prose. During this
period, Wales enjoyed a rest from propagandists and revolutionaries
which has seldom been the happy lot of any other nation--they lay
content with their own old traditions, acquiescing proudly in their
separation from the other nations of Europe, and in their aloofness from
all the movements which shook England and the continent during those
years. Dynasties came and went, one religion ousted another religion, a
new learning exposed the absurdities of the old, but the Welsh, among
their hills, knew nothing of it; and when new ideas began to brood over
the consciousness of the nation, they never got beyond the stage of
providing new subjects for _cywyddau_. The Peasant Revolt, for instance,
had but little effect on Welsh history, its most important contribution
to the heritage of the nation being Iolo Goch's superb "_Cywydd_ to the
Labourer." Even the Reformation, which helped to change the whole fabric
of English literature, had little effect on that of Wales, and the age
of the _cywydd_ dragged out wearily its last ye