s day,
strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains:
these regions also were held by Gaels. But just south of those
mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and
Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem
never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric
Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.

About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who
conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later
the Scottish kingdom of history. They also invaded Wales and
England, and sent their fleets far and wide: they were the
'Picts and Scots' of the history-books. There seems also to have
been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the
Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they
found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in
the course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which
reigned till the Edwardian Conquest. It is pretty safe to say
that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally
offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them
fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English
race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the
fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the
continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in
vigor than the Saxon incomers. And as we saw in the first of
these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon
element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.

But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades
that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic
element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the
Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped,
remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes.
To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy
far-off things,--unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;--
but grandiose. Titanic vague figures loom up: Arthur, the type
of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin,
type of magicians. Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand
moments of the _Morte D'Arthur;_ and missed it by a thousand
miles elsewhere in the _Idylls._ The spirit, the atmosphere, is
that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder;
into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles. There is a
sense of being on the brin