a principal Druid for choragus. The scene
is the sacred grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the description
of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the
cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like
Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton commends
highly the chorus on "Death" in this piece, as well as the chorus of
bards at the end of West's "Institution of the Garter." For the
materials of his "Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians and
chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of
whom he refers. Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the
last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a
crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the
murder of his brothers in song.

But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans'
"Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh. The most
considerable of these was "The Triumphs of Owen," published among Gray's
collected poems in 1768. This celebrates the victory over the
confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a
prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, "the dragon son on Mona." The
other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise
of fallen heroes: "Caradoc," "Conan," and "The Death of Hoel." They were
printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764.

The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating
between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in
1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for
mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden
and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the
Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor
under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping,
however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without
entering too minutely on particulars"; or "still better, to graft any
wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's own invention, upon the Druid
stock." But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in "The Bard,"
thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The weaving of the winding
sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their
texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art