THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I. 1. Poèmes des Bardes Bretons du VIe Siècle, traduits pour la première fois, avec le texte en regard, revu sur les plus anciens manuscrits. Par Th. Hersart de la Villemarqué. Paris. 1850. 2. Cyclops Christianus. By Algernon Herbert, late of Merton College, and of the Inner Temple. 1849. 3. Supplement for 1850 to the Archæologia Cambrensis. London and Tenby. 1851. F these three books the first is the most charming of its O curiously the most creditable to Cimbric archæologists that we have seen for some time. A study of the three, preceded by Sharon Turner's Vindication of the Bards' as an introduction, and followed, if the sacred hunger were not yet appeased, by Mr. Stephens's 'Literature of the Cymry,' with some inspection of the British laws and triads already translated, would furnish our readers in general with a far clearer idea of the most venerable antiquities of their country than they probably now possess. Mr. Parry's recent volume on Royal Progresses in Wales also deserves a prominent place among the general histories of the Principality. The industry of the author has brought fresh facts to light from authentic documents; and being written in a readable, though not highly impartial or critical style, his book is more instructive, though certainly it is less dignified, than Warrington. The literature of the Cymry (that is, of the people who may be identified with the Belgic Britons of Cæsar, and whom we now vaguely term Welsh) may be described with sufficient accuracy, for the purpose of broad classification, as falling roughly into four great periods. The first is that unmapped region of cloud, which we venture for the present to term aboriginal, as being marked by no clear traces either of Christianity or of Roman occupation. It is represented only by some very obscure fragments of ritual; by a few triads which bear signs both of high antiquity VOL. XCI. NO. CLXXXII. T and and of having been tampered with, if not re-cast, at a more recent date; by various proverbs; and possibly by some portions of the laws ascribed to Duvnwal Moelmud. The name, indeed, of the legislator denotes rather a social state, which may be inferred from broken vestiges, than either a distinct person or a precise era. Yet we are inclined to select it from among its suspicious companions in the chronicle of British Kings, as having possibly some claim to reality. To forbid that either the blow of a father, or that of a chieftain marshalling his clan in battle, should be returned, appears to us the sort of rudiment of order which we might expect to find. Nor is it less natural, while it is thoroughly in harmony with Cæsar's account of the respect paid to the Druids, that no naked weapon should be levelled against a bard or priest; and the respect paid to handicrafts, as shown by the sentiment which ranked the worker in metal among bards and scholars, is significant of an age when iron was both imported and precious from its scarcity. It is rather more embarrassing to find mines apparently alluded to as something disagreeable; and it does not appear whether this might possibly have been the effect of taskwork under Phoenician or Roman visitors, or whether the reason was merely that minerals, like the chase, sanctioned on the part of lords or chieftains an undesirable encroachment. At all events, mines belonged to a different category of things from a bridal procession or a festival, whether bardic or religious. Perhaps the most frequently cited of the whole number of the alleged laws is the one which forbade either the horse, or the harp, or the book of any free Cambrian to be seized for debt. We should be glad to see sufficient proof that so chivalric a provision is of very high antiquity. Our second stage was begotten in that time of trouble when the Cymry, themselves perhaps as much intruders in the west* as they had been victims in the east of the island, were giving way reluctantly before successive tribes of Angles and Jutes; and when the masculine vigour of the race proved itself, if not quite, as Mr. Herbert thinks, in engendering new forms of faith, at least in many stubborn conflicts of battle, and some of It will be seen that we adopt, though with some qualification, the conclusions respecting the Gael in Gwynedh, arrived at formerly by Lhwyd, and now confirmed by Mr. Basil Jones. It is a blemish upon the generally sound and critical method of the essay referred to, that it quotes as authority so palpable a forgery as the PseudoRichard of Cirencester. Nor perhaps ought much stress to be laid upon the term Scotus, which was used with sufficient laxity to be applied to the schoolman Duns, though he was born in Northumberland. Moreover the three dialects referred to in the Triad quoted by Mr. Jones, ought, for the benefit of his argument, to have differed as much as the Erse differs from the Cumraic; whereas it is more probable that the difference was slight, and merely one of dialect. thought. thought. Obscure as this period is in places, persons, and creeds, it cannot be said to have wanted the sacred poet; for then those bards, whose names have resounded throughout the world, solaced, in rugged but nervous strains, that kingdom kingdomless' (edeyrn diedeyrn) whose fall they had previously arrested with the sword. 6 The third period is not so much British as Welsh, yet it far surpasses in pretension, perhaps also in richness, alike the ages which precede and those which follow. For in the tenth century Howel the Good flourished as a legislator; the eleventh saw the introduction of some Norman refinements, with a fresh tinge of romance from Brittany; during the twelfth the far-off echo of the Crusades, and the brilliant reigns of Owen Gwynedh and Rhys of Dynevor,* though not unsoiled by disaster, helped to kindle the national spirit. So grew up, under the shelter of numerous chieftains' dwellings which affected a mimicry of palaces, a genuine and peculiar school of literature, with such features as naturally sprang from the character of the times. The whole region has recently enjoyed in Mr. Stephens a thorough and candid explorer; we can scarcely quite say, for English readers, a popular expounder. We mercifully refrain from accepting the challenge with which his book unadvisedly closes; yet the period was certainly one of considerable mental activity, and was pregnant with influences, some of them very widely extended, the effect of which has not yet passed away. Then Caradoc of Llancarvan wrote his Chronicle. Then romantic stories of King Arthur flowed in strange forms, freshly molten by the imagination either of Bishop Geoffry, or of the Armorican author whom he more probably followed to some extent; though we fully admit that the same stories may have received an earlier shaping, and possibly even on the threshold of the eighth century, from Tysilio. Then-we are now reverting to our later date-the Cymry discovered themselves to be the first men, and invented or were deluded by etymologies which seemed to prove it. With their ancient limits narrowed and threatened, even in the Cambria which was to remain Cambrian, by the encroaching strongholds of Norman barons, their views of the propriety of invasion differed considerably from those of their race when the long-handed Caswalhon† smote Serigi the Celt, and More properly Rhys ab Gruffydh-upon whom the chronicler indulges in some high-flown eulogy, which evidently is made up of bardic fragments. We get a precise, and hitherto unobserved date, for at least one important migration of the Northern Cymry from the borders of the Tweed and the Tyne to those of the Conwy and the Dee, by comparing Ammianus with Nævius. The first tells us of a turbulent and migratory movement among the Picts under the year 367; and the second makes the coming of Cunedha from the region of the Ottadini 146 years and drove his subjects from their Anglesey homes into the sea. They now conceived themselves to be the only persons who had ever come to the country peaceably, and consequently its only rightful possessors. The ancient triads, therefore (though such a form of recording events or maxims is as old as our earliest classical notices of Britain), were then re-cast or interpolated; while the Mabinogion (of which Lady Charlotte Guest's translation deserves warm gratitude from all pure lovers of literature) underwent even a more liberal measure of the same process. Rather, indeed, they were then written; but even in them are vestiges of a hoar antiquity, and it is a sad mistake to test the far more ancient germs, as Mr. Stephens has in some cases done, by the full-blown form which they assume in the Mabinogion. The bards of this period (which may be termed the twelfth century, with a broad margin in each direction) are numerous, and of various degrees of merit. Excelling, generally, their more renowned predecessors of the sixth century in elaborate art, they sin by a perverse ingenuity, which degenerates into formal quaintness, and, without extinguishing their fire, compels it to smoulder, like that of the Scandinavian Scalds, with a dull and uncertain heat. But, whether for specimens or for a fuller character of them, we must refer our readers either to Evan Evans,* or to Mr. Stephens. This school may be said to reach its climax, and almost its close, in the fine elegy of Gruffydh upon the last Llywelyn. The later bards dwell chiefly on softer subjects. Rhys the Red excelled in pastorals-and Davydh ab Gwilym, whose song was declared by his contemporaries to have the sweetness of wine, may either close the properly medieval period, or stand almost at the head of that modern school under which all subsequent bards must here suffer themselves to be classed. It will perhaps be objected that at least the York and Lancaster period, with a certain outburst of the bardic furor which heralded the accession of Henry VII., deserved to stand alone—or we may be invited to listen to the loyal poet Huw Morus, and his three hundred songs, during the Civil Wars; but our more learned Welsh readers must excuse us if, in a mere introduction to a sketch, we pass lightly over the minuter subdivisions which would befit a literary history. Judging, indeed, from the specimen of Lewis Glyn Cothi, before Maelgwyn's reign, to the beginning of which the year 513 is a probable approximation. Caswalhon is termed grandson of Cunedha, and father of Maelgwyn. We should be glad to see these specimens revised, and edited, without the dissertations, by some competent person, who might also select a few additional poems, for the benefit of the many readers who would like some idea of the Welsh bards without wading through tomes of antiquarian controversy. The Notes to Madoc, and to Samor, give some aid. who who has been carefully edited, we are not inclined to anticipate any highly marked excellence between Davydh ab Gwilym and comparatively recent, or almost contemporary, authors. Not that the Muse slept; but, as English education advanced, mere Welsh literature represented less the cultivated intellect of the Principality. Henry Vaughan of Brecon, for example, forsook the Galatea of his native tongue to become an imitator of George Herbert; and, equalling his master in piety, surpassed him easily in poetical tenderness.* Only in the last century the patronage and example of Lewis Morris, an Anglesey gentleman, gave fashion in the Principality a more archaic turn; the genius of Goronwy Owen, as a poet, made remarkable, rather than palliated, his misconduct as a clergyman; and in some lines by Evan Evans there is a charm of melancholy beauty almost unsurpassed. The want of grasp and compass of subject, which is the defect usual in the mass of Welsh poets, may be said to be in some degree redeemed by the long and earnest-minded piece of Davydh ab Ionawr on the Trinity; and an Ode upon a Thunder-storm is often quoted as exemplifying the great energy of his language. Of the merit of the Welsh hymns we have before spoken; they naturally freed themselves from the metrical fetters of the Bards and Scalds of the middle ages; and we would suggest to the impugners of the decision pronounced by recent Eistedhvods in favour of the freedom of the Muse, that it could never be wise for their professed tribunals to impose on their literature a technical code, which it spurned of itself the moment it drew fresh life from the heart of the people. But it is chiefly to the second of the periods above rapidly sketched that we now propose, with the aid of no incompetent guide, to introduce our readers. M. Villemarqué is already favourably known in this country by his publication of the Breton Songs. He now ventures upon a kindred soil, though one less immediately his own; and, though versed, perhaps, less profoundly in the lore of our insular Britons than a chosen few—such * Our readers will, we believe, thank us for transcribing these lines on Primitive Piety: 'Fair solitary path! whose blessed shades The old, white Prophets planted first and drest; Without to-morrow's ills and future loads?' From Vaughan, too, Campbell borrowed his fine idea of the world's gray fathers gazing on the rainbow, and, to the credit of his frankness, quoted the passage, though with niggardly praise, in his selections from the British Poets. as |