1895-96.] WALES AND ITS LITERATURE. 05 



to his own admission, "occupied the seaboard or western portion of 

 Wales were not a portion of the original inhabitants (5f the country, but 

 immigrants from Ireland who chanced to make their homes in that part 

 ■of Wales." There is prima facie a stronger likelihood that the Gaels in 

 •question were the remains of a Celtic population, older in point of time 

 and occupation, than that they came from Ireland and finally settled in 

 Wales amid the fluctuations which then obtained among the nations that 

 contended for supremacy in Britain. 



P2dward Lhuyd, the Father of Celtic Philology, has this opinion to 

 advance: "There are none of the Irish themselves that I know of, 

 amongst all the writings they have published about the origin and 

 history of their nation, that maintained they were possessed of England 

 and Wales ; and yet whoever takes notice of a great many of the names 

 of rivers and mountains throughout the kingdom will find no reason to 

 doubt but that the Irish must have been the inhabitants when those 

 names were imposed upon the rivers and mountains." 



With reference to the Ogam inscriptions which are to be found in 

 Wales, Professor Rhys asserts that " the Celts who spoke the language 

 of the Celtic epitaphs were in part the ancestors of the Welsh and 

 Cornish peoples. In other words, they were the Goidels belonging to 

 the first Celtic invasion of Britain, and of whom some passed over into 

 Ireland and made the island also Celtic. Some time later there arrived 

 another Celtic people with another Celtic language. These later invaders 

 called themselves Brittones, and seized on the best portions of Britain, 

 driving the Goidelic Celts before them to the west and north of the 

 island, and it is the language of these retreating Goidels of Britain that 

 we have in the old inscriptions, and not of Goidelic invaders from 

 Ireland. Their Goidelic speech which was driven out by the ever- 

 increasing dialects of the Brythones was practically the same language 

 as that of the Celts of Ireland, of Man, and of Scotland." 



" It has been ingeniously contended that the root in Britamii and 

 Brittones is identical with the Welsh briih, spotted, fem. braith. It 

 would appear, therefore, that the word Brythoii and "its congeners meant 

 a clothed or cloth-clad people. The name may be regarded as meant to 

 distinguish the Brittones from the natives whom they found in posses- 

 sion, and whose clothing may have consisted of the skins of the animals 

 that they killed, . . . It is safe to limit the name to the non-Goidelic 

 branch of the Celts of the second invasion." 



The Welsh have a copious literature. As well in prose as in 

 verse, they have many works of venerable antiquity and, therefore, 

 5 



