88 
«‘ There are hundreds of such sayings, dating from time im- 
memorial, and many of them quite familiar to the common 
people.” 
«The Mabinogion’ ought, of course to form a subject by 
itself. Tho old romances were first collected in the Thirteenth 
or Fourteenth Century, but many of them date from an earlier 
period. Arthur, of course, is not originally a Welsh hero, though 
he figures largely in these romances. But the oldest ‘Mabinogion ’ 
know nothing of Arthur. Readers of Tennyson know the charm 
there is in these ancient romances. It is now more than fifty 
years since Lady Guest gave the English public her beautiful 
translation of them, and there is now a cheap edition issued, 
edited by Professor O. M. Edwards, of Oxford. It seems strange 
that with these stories as a guide, the Welsh writers of the 
Centuries from the Fourteenth to the Highteenth, do not appear 
to have done much with fiction. Allegories there are in abund- 
ance—such books, for instance, as the ‘ Story of the Three Birds.’ 
I cannot understand how this beautiful book is not well known and 
much appreciated in England. There have been no more daring 
attempts to solve the mystery of the eternal and the unknown. 
‘The Visions of the Sleeping Bard,’ for instance, is a grand old 
book in spite of its sectarian narrowness. The good old clergy- 
man, Ellis Wynne, who was born in the neighbourhood of 
Harlech, in 1671, could not deny himself the pleasure of picturing 
his Nonconformist neighbours in the terrors of perdition. He 
more than half destroyed his book by this, nevertheless, 
Dante himself would not have been ashamed of some parts of it. 
But beyond this class of work we have not much real fiction 
from the time of the ‘Mabinogion’ to the last century. 
During recent years we have had many capable writers. The 
ordinary fiction writer flourishes among us. Chief of them 
to-day is Mr. B. G. Evans ; but his work does not describe the 
Welsh character as contradistinguished from other nationalities. 
But writers like William Rees, William Ambrose, Daniel Owen, and 
Winnie Parry describe the Welsh character as it is.” 
At the conclusion of his Paper, Mr. Davies read several speci- 
mens of Welsh fiction translated by himself and others, including 
the following :— 
FIRST VISIT TO THE LODGING. 
By Daniel Owen. 

‘The first place that I must take you to is your lodging,”’ said Mr. Pugh. 
“The woman’s name is Mrs. Jones; she is a widow woman—a very kind 
woman, only that she speaks rather too much about her departed husband ; 
but you’ll soon get used to that.”’ 
