nguage heard by Caesar as the Romance
tongues are developements of Caesar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than
any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure
and to settled literary form. No other mediaeval literature shows at its
outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.
But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling
freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into
a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the
strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic
tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.

[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry]

The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact,
tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal. When
Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass. The "descent
into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, shakes off the mediaeval horror
with the mediaeval reverence, and the knight who achieves the quest spends
his years of infernal durance in hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse
with fair women. The world of the Mabinogion is a world of pure phantasy,
a new earth of marvels and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is
broken by the hermit's bell and sunny glades where the light plays on the
hero's armour. Each figure as it moves across the poet's canvas is bright
with glancing colour. "The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured
silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which were precious
emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold than the flower of the
broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her
hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the
spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of
the falcon, was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the
breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses."
Everywhere there is an Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the
gorgeousness is seldom oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper,
so quick to perceive beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its
emotions, its adventures, its sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a
passionate melancholy that expresses its revolt against the impossible, by
an instinct of what is noble, by a sentiment that discove