tn 



WF.r.SH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



WELSH LANGUAGE AND LITKRATCJRE. 



871 



finally returned to Klemingstone, in Glamorganshire, within about two 

 mile* of hi. birthplace, and there continued till his death. lolo. hi,.- 

 hi friend, wan a great pedestrian, so much so, that when bis ion Taliesin 

 bought him a hone, he could not be prevailed upon to ride, and carried 

 hi* eccentricity to far as to lead the animal about the country on hi* 

 journey* without ever mounting it. lie bad a personal triad of hi* 

 own : " There are three thing* I do not want : a hone, for I have a 

 good pair of leg* ; a cellar, for I drink no beer ; and a purse, for I have 

 no money. 1 ' It i* painful to record that In- .jimrrcllod with hi* friends 

 of the ' Myvyrian Archaiology,' and complained that Owen Junes had 

 not paid him some money which was due to him ; while at the same 

 time hi* principle* were so high that he refused to take possession of an 

 estate in Jamaica, which bad been left him by bis brother*, because it 

 was cultivated by slaves. He wrote between two and three thousand 

 Welsh hymn*, some of which are highly esteemed, and were published 

 under the title of ' Salman yr Eglwys yn yr Anialwch ' (' Psalms of the 

 Church in the Desert ') ; but, as his friend Waring tells us, " his creed 

 p|veared to be so whimsical a compound of Christianity and Druidiam, 

 1'hilosopby and Mysticism, that the ' History of all Religions,' copious 

 a* it is in variety, furnishes no definition of it" He was surrounded, 

 in spite of his eccentricities, by general respect, which was strikingly 

 manifested at the great Eisteddvod of Caermarthen, in 1819. His 

 death took place in 1826, at the age of eighty -one. He appears, from 

 some letters published in the 'Cambrian Register' for 1818, to have 

 written bis autobiography, with a surrey of Welsh literature during 

 hi* time, but this work, which would certainly have been of value, has 

 disappeared. His son, Taliesiu Williams, was to have written an ex- 

 tended biography of his father, but the project was never put in 

 execution. A life of him, which ap]>earcd in 1850, from the pen of an 

 English friend, Elijah Waring, who was unacquainted with the Welsh 

 language, is an amusing volume of light reading, but not the sort 

 of biography required ; for though in all his letters and writings which 

 remain, lolo Morganwg appears the frankest of the frank, there are 

 several points in his literary career which require elucidation, and on 

 which df|*nd important questions with regard to Welsh literature. 



Edward Williams was an English as well an a Welsh pqet. His 

 ' English Poems. Lyrical and Pastoral,' published in two volumes with 

 the date of 1794, present perhaps the most curious list of subscribers 

 that was ever attached to any publication. It begins with the name of 

 the Prince of Wales ; it contains those of Mrs. Barbauld and Miss 

 Burney, of William Lisle Bowles the poet, and William Bowles, " Gene- 

 ralissimo of the Creek nation," Miss Hannah More and Mrs. Yearsley 

 the milkmaid, Cowper, the poet of the ' Task," and Rogers, the poet of 

 the ' Pleasures of Memory,' Cyril Jackson, Dean of Christ Church, and 

 Dr. Priestley of Birmingham, Mr. Itaikes of Gloucester, the founder of 

 .Sunday Schools, and Mr. Thomas Paine, Dr. Parr and Mr. HorneTooke, 

 Citizen Brissot, Wilbcrforcc and General Washington. The poems are 

 of some merit, but the chief point of interest that now attaches to the 

 volume* centres in the notes. One of the pieces is an ' Ode on the 

 Mythology of the Ancient British Bards in the manner of Taliesin, 

 recited on Primrose Hill at a meeting of British Bards in the summer 

 solstice of 1792, and ratified at the subsequent autumnal equinox and 

 uinter solstice.' Primrose Hill was then a comparatively unfre- 

 quented green height in the fields between London and HampsU-ad, 

 distinguished by a grove of trees which was barbarously cut .!<!, 

 about 1828, and bcmg in view of Owen Pughe's residence nt 1'cn- 

 tonville, may have been selected as a more convenient place fur a 

 meeting of bants than the summit of Plinlimmon originally named. 

 Edward Williams, who was then an ardent republican, seems to have 

 been at the same time an equally ardent defender of the privileges of 

 the British bards. . These, be maintained, were a regular corporate body, 

 traceable from the earliest times to his own, in which there was only 

 one legitimate Ixard of bards remaining, the " Chair of Glamorgan," 

 and only two members of that, himself 'and the Rev. Evan Evans of 

 Aberdare, 



In the notes to his ' Ode,' he gives a number of Triads in Welsh and 

 English, containing the doctrines of " the Bards," and embracing a 

 system of theology which is declaredt o be anterior to Christianity. 

 luit no more adverse to it than the religion of Enoch, Noah, and 

 Abraham. " There are three circles or states of existence," according 

 to one of these Triads : " the Circle of Infinity, where there is nothing 

 i .-it i iod of living or dead, and nunc but God can traverse it ; the Circle 

 of Indication, where all thing* are by nature derived from death this 

 circle ha* been traversed by man ; and the Circle of Felicity, where all 

 thing* spring from life this man shall traverse in heaven." " Ani- 

 mated being* have three state* of existence," says another Triad ; " th.it 

 of Indication in the great deep or lowest point of existence, that of 

 Liberty in the slat* of Humanity, and that of Love which is felicity in 

 Heaven." The system is further explained as one of metempsychosis, 

 and there i* a larger development of it contributed by Williams to the 

 preface to hi* friend Owen Pughe'i edition of Llywarch Hen. In 

 this it i* said, among other things, "No finite beings can possibly 

 bear the infinite tedium of eternity. They will be relieved from it by 

 continual renovations at proper periods, by passing into new mode* of 

 existence and which will not, like death, be dreaded, but be eagerly 

 looked for and approached with joy. Every existence will impart ita 

 peculiar epoch of knowledge, lor consciousness and memory will 

 remain, or there would he no such thing as endless life." 



Then doctrine*, first put in print at tin- time of the French I: 



rtainly bear a close resemblance to many of those which 1. 1 I 

 it that period, and it was a point of some interest to kn..w 

 how far back they could in reality be traced. William* informed the 

 readers of his ' Poem* ' that the Triads be had given were " i 

 manuscript collection by Llewelyn Sion, a bard of Glamorgan, about 

 the year 1560. Of this manuscript" he added, " I have a transcript ; 

 the original is in tin- p,.->.-.v-i.,n of Mr. Richard Bradford, of Bettws, 

 near Bridgend, in Glamorgan. This collection was made from various 

 manuscripts of considerable, and some of very great, antiquity these 

 ami their authors are mentioned, and most or all of th. m Mill extant." 

 It is not surprising that they were not received with unlimited confi- 

 dence in their authenticity, but it is very surprising that Mo did not 

 take the best method of silencing doubU by printing the main, 

 in the Myvyrian Archaiology, which a few years after he was engaged 

 in editing. Far from this, he did not even show it to his friend who 

 l>ul>linhc<l the extracts. The manuscript in which they were contained 

 bore the title of ' Cy vrinach y Beirdd ' or the ' Secret of the Bards,' 

 and was in two parts. " Edward Williams had only the first part with 

 him in London, says Owen Pughe in a letter to his son in 1819, first 

 printed by his grandson (in the ' Cambrian Journal ' for 1857, ] 

 " at least he said he had not the second, which by his description is 

 the most curious, and the real Cyvrinach," and this Owen Pughe never 

 saw. The association of the Myvyrian Archaiology finally broke up 

 without its appearing. " In my collection," says lolo, in a document 

 printed by Waring, " I strenuously opposed the absurd fables of the. 

 darker ages, which are most obviously falsehoods of the. darkest hue. 

 This gave offence to my coadjutors, who charged me with rejecting 

 supposititious documents which never existed, whirb I with diligence 

 could never find, and which they cannot but know do not exist else- 

 where. Such are the fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, that of Kin^ 

 Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and many things m 

 the same character." It would seem from this that Williams quar- 

 relled with Owen Pughe on the question of the insertion of the Mabi- 

 nogion, which never appeared in the Archaiology, but it is strange 

 that under the circumstances he should talk in this strain respecting 

 " supposititious documents." The Rev. Edward D.ivies, in liis Muho 

 logy of the Druids,' published in 1809, very plainly intimated that he 

 considered the ' Bardic Triads,' with their theophilanthropic idea*, as 

 supposititious. Doubts on the same score were freely expressed by 

 many, but in 1819, lolo Morganwg had a distinguished triumph nt the 

 Eisteddvod of Caermarthen, where he invested Dr. Burgess, the Bishop 

 of St. David's, with the insignia of a Bard. From that time Bards, 

 Druids, and Ovate*, once reduced to two in number, have 1 

 numerous and in vogue, and Bardism has held a position in Wale*. 

 analogous to that of Freemasonry in England. The call naturally 

 became louder for the publication of the documents on which the 

 institution was supposed to rest ; and finally, in IS-'J, loin Morganwg, 

 thru .-i man of seventy-seven, issued a prospectus to publish a work in 

 \\Ylsh to contain tin- ' Esoteric Literature of the British Bards.' lie 

 died four years after without having published it. It was only n 

 that his son brought out the long-expected ' Cyvrinach y Ileirdd,' and 

 in it, to the surprise of all, though the work was published as cor 

 no ' Triads of Bardism ' were to be found. The ' Cyvrinach ' of 1 Mist 

 was simply an excellent treatise on Welsh versification by Llcwvlyn 

 Sion, of Llangewyd, interspersed with some very absurd 8tatcin.ni- 

 respecting the Welsh language before the Flood, which of course dcriv.-d 

 no authority from having been made by a man of the age of Elizabeth. 

 According to the ' Cyvrinach ' there are but three proper languages 

 that spoken by Adam before the Fall, which i now the language of 

 God, the angels, and the sainte in Heaven ; that written by Moses, which 

 is the language of tin- Scriptures (a statement showing that the writer 

 ili'l not know that the Testament is in Greek) ; and that first spoki -n 

 by Enoch, the son of Seth, and now spoken by the Welsh in Wale*. 

 Welsh is thus the only living language of divine origin ; and the Aw en 

 or poetic genius of the Welsh is due to divine inspiration, while the 

 poetry of the Saxon, English, and other corrupted languages, is in 

 l.y their inventor the devil. 



Some disappointment was naturally felt at the non-appearance of the 

 ' Bardic Triads ' in the book, the chief interest of which consisted in 

 its being supposed to contain them, but no explanation could !> 

 obtained further than that, of the two parts of the 'Cyvrinach,' 

 Taliesin Williams hod only printed the first. No public infou 

 was vouchsafed as to why he had not printed the second, or wi 

 become of it. The admirers of the Bardic Triads were reduced to 

 look forward to the publication of them in a volume on the lolo Manu- 

 scripts, a large collection of transcripts made by lolo Morganwg, and 

 from which Taliesin was engaged by the Welsh Manuscript Society 

 to make and publish a selection. By a second misfortune, Talieein 

 Williams died in 1847, before the publication of the lolo Manuscript*, 

 as his father had died before the publication of the ' Cyvrinach.' So 

 much, however, had been printed before his decease, as to render it 

 certain that the Bardic Triads would have formed no portion of tin- 

 volume. The lolo Manuscripts, published by the Welsh Manuscript 

 Society in 1849, contain a variety of pieces of very different value, 

 respecting the origin of which we only learn that they were taken from 

 transcript* made by lolo Morganwg from other transcripts of which 

 he mention* the possessors, adding in some cases from what 





