l3 WELSH LANGUAGE AKD LITERATURE. 



WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITEHATriJK. 



HidYT the Saxon (1180-1230), of Philip Brydydd (1200-60), and 

 Piydydd Bychon (1210-60), are three of the mort conspicuous of the 

 period they belong to. Their poems are chiefly eulogies on the princes 

 and great men with whom they were connected. 



The next generation of bards was that which witnessed the con- 

 quest of Wales by the English. According to a current story which 

 has been made universally known by 'The Bud' of dray, they must 

 hare perished by the sword of the invader; but the notion of the 

 massacre of the bards appears v> rest on no adequate authority. There 

 is no memorial or tradition of it in the country which is said to 

 have been its scene, and no allusion to it in the productions of bards 

 of the time immediately following. In the ' M yvyrian Archaiology ' 

 there appears no greater falling off in the number of poetical pro- 

 ductions than might naturally be expected as the result of a foreign 

 conquest, of however mild a character ; and the next century was 

 destined to produce a banl who in national popularity surpassed all 

 who preceded him. 



The representatives of the Scandinavian Scalds in Cambrian poetry 

 gave way to a Troubadour. Davydd ab Gwiljm has sometimes been 

 called -the Welsh Ovid, and sometimes the Welsh Petrarch, but is 

 aid by his English translator to " approach .more nearly to Burns than 

 to any other poet, whether of his own or other countries." His poems 

 are of a character almost entirely new in the literature of Wales; 

 the subjects of them ore chiefly themes of love and social festivity, 

 instead of valour and heroism. The exact dates of Davydd's birth 

 and death are unknown, but he is supposed to have been born about 

 1340, and to have died about 1400, the year of the death of our 

 Chaucer. The incidents of his life, which have been related at some 

 length by Owen Jones and Owen Pughe, are chiefly connected with 

 his success in love and in satire. On one occasion he eloped with 

 a married woman who had been his paramour ; but the fugitives were 

 overtaken and separated, and Davydd was condemned to pay a heavy 

 fine, from which the men of Glamorgan, who had elected him their 

 chief bard, and who looked more to his genius than his morality, re- 

 leased him by discharging it In satire his powers were so tremendous 

 that when Khys Meigan, another bard, incensed him by a poem 

 reflecting on the illegitimacy of his birth, he replied in another of 

 such pungency that Rhys, on hearing it recited, fell down and expired. 

 Later in life another contest of satire with Gruffydd Gryg, an ancient bard 

 of Anglesea, was brought to a more agreeable close by a good-natured 

 stratagem of Bola Bauol, a mutual friend. He contrived that a report 

 of the death of each should reach the cars of the other ; and, as he 

 expected, on receipt of the sad intelligence animosity was forgotten. 

 Davydd composed a panegyrical elegy on Gruffydd, and Gruffydd one on 

 Davydd ; and when the trick was discovered the friendship was renewed 

 with more warmth than ever. The chief object of his satire was, how- 

 ever, the " Little Hunchback," Bwa Bach, the husband of the Morvydd, 

 to whom a hundred and forty of the love-poems of Ab Gwilym are 

 addressed. The religious orders of the time are also taken to task by 

 a poet whose right to criticise them is not very clearly made out. 

 Towards the close of his life, Davydd ab Gwilym, surviving his friends, 

 became of a melancholy and religious turn, and some verses composed 

 on his death-bed ore said to breathe a strain of genuine piety. 



The poems of Davydd ab Gwilym were first published in Welsh 

 only, with on English biographical notice, by Owen Jones and Owen 

 Pughe, in 1789. An English translation of several of the best, by Mr. 

 Arthur Johnes, under the assumed name of Moelog, appeared in 1834. 

 Mr. Borrow gives us to understand in his ' Lavengro ' that he bos com- 

 pleted a translation of the works of Ab Gwilym with notes, critical, 

 historical, and explanatory, but nothing of this version has been made 

 public. Mr. Borrow is a warm admirer of the Welsh poet. " I have no 

 hesitation in saying," he observes, " that he makes one of the some 

 half-dozen really great poets whose verses, in whatever language they 

 write, exist at the present day and are more or less known." 



Contemporary with Davydd ab Gwilym during the whole course of 

 his career, and flourishing long before and after it, was lolo Goch, the 

 friend and domestic bard of Owain Glyndwr, or Owen Glendower, who 

 wrote verses on the death of Tudyr ab Gronw in 1315, and on the comet 

 of 1402, and who died about 1420, at the age, it is supposed, of nearly 

 a century and a quarter. If the dates be correct, he must have been 

 about 118 at the time that he spoke of Owain, who died at 67, as 

 " old." On* of his most interesting pieces, composed two years before 

 the insurrection of Glyndwr, is a description of Owain's house at 

 Sychortb, which the poet somewhat hyperbolically compares to West- 

 minster Abbey, and which he describes ita master as keeping almost 

 literally an " open house," there being neither bolts, bars, nor door- 

 keeper, lolo Goch wrote several poems to inflame his countrymen in 

 their riling, and lamented the death nf Owain in a patriotic elegy. 



Some uncertainty seems to prevail as to the date of Sion Cent, or 

 John of Kent, a poet and religions writer, who is stated by Owen 

 Pughe to have lived between 1410 and 1470, and by Williams to have 

 nourished from 1380 to 1410. The latter date is probably the correct 

 one, if Sion Cent was, as he appears to have been, a Lollard. His 

 name was derived not from the county of Kent, but from Kentchurch, 

 or Kentchester, in Herefordshire, where he resided. His poems, which 

 are of interest in an historical point of view, as illustrating, like our 

 Piers Plowman, the dawn of the Reformation, are the subject of a 

 series of article* in the ' Cambrian Journal ' for 1860. His name is 



still current in popular tradition as that of a conjuror, probably owing 

 to his having been a heretic. 



The last of our list of bards of the second period of Welsh poetry is 

 Lewis Qlyn Cothi, who flourished during the wars of the Rons, which 

 terminated in the accession of a Tudor to the English throne. He was 

 the bard to Jasper, earl of Pembroke, sou of Owen Tudor aixl tin- 

 widow of Henry V., and fought with his patron at the battle of 

 Mortimer's Cross in 1461. His works are of less poetical than histo- 

 rical value, throwing a considerable light on the history of Wales during 

 his period. They were first published, in the original Welsh, with 

 English notes, chiefly of explanatory historical matter, I 

 mrodorion, or Royal Cambrian Institution, in the year 1837, under UM 

 editorship of the Rev. John Jones, of Christchurch, known by the 

 name of Tegid. 



The bards we have mentioned are but a small proportion of those 

 who flourished, and some of whose compositions have been preserved. 

 Mr. Stephens, in his ' Literature of the Kymry during the Twelfth and 

 Two Succeeding Centuries,' mentions six-and-twenty poets whose 

 names we have not enumerated, between 1350 and 1400; and at or 

 subsequent to the year 1400, during the revolt of Glyndwr and the 

 wars of the Roses, the bards amounted, he states, to "several 

 hundreds." 



It is stated by Owen Pughe, in the ' Archrcologia ' (vol. xiv., p. 216), 

 that the principal heads under which ancient Welsh literature may b* 

 classed are poetry, bardic institutes, laws, history, theology, ethics, 

 proverbs, dramatic tales, and grammars ; and that " the first of these 

 classes, poetry, is by far the most extensive, for it may be computed to 

 fill about eight parts out of the ten of our old writings, omitting to 

 take into account the heraldic collections altogether ; but with respect 

 to the quantity that is printed, such a proportion may be reversed." 

 " On this subject," he adds, " I have made a calculation so as to enable 

 me to infer that I have perused upwards of 13,000 poetical pieces of 

 various denominations for the purpose of collecting words in the course 

 of about eighteen years that I have been compiling the dictionary of 

 the Welsh language." 



Towards the conclusion of the second period of Welsh literature 

 some alterations of consequence took place in the laws of metrical 

 composition. Certain changes appear to have been proposed and 

 adopted at a congress of bards held in 1350, under the presidency of 

 Ivor Hael, or Ivor the Generous, the constant patron and friend of 

 Davydd ab Owilym ; but it was a hundred and one years later, in 

 1451, that at the Eisteddvod of Caermarthen, held under the influence 

 of Gruflydd ab Nicolas, a powerful nobleman, a system was adopted 

 which prevailed for nearly four hundred succeeding years. Davydd ah 

 Edmwnd, a bard now of no great note, who was president of the Eis- 

 teddvod, succeeded in obtaining the assent of hU colleagues to four-and- 

 twenty new canons of poetry, which he had compiled with the assist- 

 ance of other bards of North Wales, and though the men of Glamorgan 

 protested against the decision, their protest seems to have hod but 

 little effect. 



The most prominent feature in the new canons is the more definite 

 establishment of laws of " Cynghanedd," or consonancy a species of 

 alliteration which was thenceforth considered as essential to verse as 

 metre and rhyme. It hod much analogy to the alliteration employed 

 in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and occasionally in earlier English poetry ; 

 but while other nations became more lax in applying it, the Welsh 

 became more stringent. A specimen of English verse, composed 

 about the middle of the 15th century, by a Welsh student at 

 Oxford, to exhibit the advantages of the " cross consonancy," is printed 

 in the second volume of the ' Cambrian Register.' A more recent 

 example, given in Walters's ' Dissertation on the Welsh Language,' 

 will perhaps convey a clearer notion of it than a lengthened description 

 The lines are on Envy : 



" A fiend in Phirbii' fane he found. 

 That yonder grew yet underground, 



Sprung from the spawn of Spite ; 

 The Elf his spleen durst not display, 

 Nor act the devil in the day, 



But at the noon of night*" 



A happier instance occurs in a song by John Parry, the Welsh 

 song-writer and composer, known as ' Bordd Alow : ' 



" God grant that Great Britain for ever may be 

 The terror of tyrants, the friend of the free." 



Alliteration is appropriately introduced by Gray in the first lino of 

 his Bard : 



" Ruin seize thce, rathlwu king,*' 



Mid by Mason in his Camctacus : 



" I marked his mall, I marked his shield, 

 I spied the sparkling of his spear, 

 I aaw his giant arm the falchion wield, 

 Wide waved the bickering blade and fired the angry'air." 



The lines of Mason also exemplify how easily the search after thi . 

 ornament may lead to the neglect of the much more essential beauty 

 of appropriate diction. A spear would not have been " spied," nor 

 would a blade have "bickered," but' for the attraction of alliteration. 

 In the third stage of Welsh literature on which we are now about to 



