HE first indwellers of the islands we call Great Britain and Ireland were a wild folk, coming we know not whence, who made rude stone weapons of flint, lived by hunting, could make fires and garments of skin, and dwelt in caves. These Palæolithic people were succeeded by, or developed into, a Neolithic race whose weapons, still of stone, were now highly polished and skilfully wrought. They began pastoral life in our island, and settled finally into communities; and the large-chamber tombs under earth, or their denuded remains, extending from Caithness to Dorset, show that they occupied all the habitable parts of the country. They were a dark-haired, dark-eyed, short, brave, and constant people; and when they mingled afterwards with the Celtic race, they left some traces of their legends, religion, and law in the stories, the manners, and the language of the Celts. We may, with great probability, identify them with the earliest Picts of history, and the Silures of South Wales were their descendants. It is only in folklore that we can hope to recover something of the way they thought and felt, but in the west of Ireland and Scotland, in Wales, and in the Midland Counties of England we still meet short, darkhaired, long-skulled people who retain the characteristics of this steady and valiant race. It is not impossible that some of the elements of their character and thought have entered into and still influence English poetry. How long they lived undisturbed does not appear, but at last an Aryan folk, part of the first Celtic migration, invaded our island, drove back these Neolithic people to the west and north, but mingled with them, and the farther west and north they pushed the greater was the admixture. This first Celtic race are named the Goidels or the Gaels, and they colonised not only Great Britain, but also the Isle of Man, the Western Isles, and Ireland. They have lasted down to our own day, and the imaginative and enkindling spirit of their thought, literature, and art, infused into the English nature by intercourse and amalgamation, have had an intermittent and spiritual * Copyright 1901 by J. B. Lippincott Company. I influence on the poetry and prose of England. That influence was sometimes great, as at the beginning of our literature. Sometimes it was but little, but it always inspired when it came. After King Alfred's days, and for a very long time, it ceased to do more than now and again to touch England; but it began to act on us again at the end of the eighteenth century, and at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth the Gaelic spirit is doing much the same kind of work it did in England during the seventh and eighth centuries. It entered northern England from Iona, where Columba, bringing with him, and handing down to his successors, the poetry and learning of Ireland, had set up his church and dwelling. Oswald, King of Northumbria, who had been educated at Iona, summoned the Celtic monks to convert his country in 634; and Oswiu, also trained at Iona, extended the Irish influence until the whole of Northumbria received the faith from Irish missionaries, and set up a number of civilising monasteries on the Irish pattern. All the awakening and inspiring emotions of religion, out of which so much of literature is born, were kindled in the north of England at the Irish fire. This lasted untouched for thirty years; and then, alongside with the Celtic, the Latin forms of learning and religion began to make their way from Ripon, from Wearmouth, from Hexham and Jarrow. The Celtic and the Latin influences mingled. Meanwhile the Irish impulse penetrated into Mercia and East Anglia from the north; and the communication between Ireland itself and England was constant, each interchanging the results of their work and knowledge. Even the south was not exempt from the pressure of Irish wisdom. The school at Canterbury in Theodore's days was full of Irish scholars. 'Whole fleets' of students passed to and fro between Wessex and Ireland. Men like Ealdhelm were trained by Irish hermits who set up schools; and Glastonbury became a special centre of Irish learning, legend, and song; so that we may even say that Dunstan, long years afterwards, derived from the nest of Irish scholars who were settled there part of the spirit which made his character, and began that Renaissance of English learning which Alfred had failed, but so nobly failed, to establish. This was the Goidelic invasion of England, and its imaginative and formative powers through all the poetry of Northumbria, and ran stimulated the desires of Wessex and Mercia to know, and to feel after, the unknown. race A second Wandering of the Celtic followed on the first, and some of its warriors, settling in Gaul, were allured by the white cliffs of England, and by the tales of sailors, to cross the Channel. The first of these invaders landed on the south-eastern coasts, perhaps as early as 300 B.C., and drove back the Goidels, as these had driven back the Neolithic people, to the the west and north. The last of these Gaulish tribes who came to our land were the Belgæ. To all these men of the second Celtic Wandering the name of 'Brythons' has been given. When they had banished the Goidels from about a third part of Britain, the Romans checked their development for a year or two in 55 B.C., but did not come again for ninety years. During these ninety years the Brythons pushed on till they mastered the most of Britain, and even those lands where the Goidels remained (Devon, Cornwall, portions of Wales, Cumberland and Westmoreland, and part of Lancashire) became Brythonic in language, manners, and poetry. North of the Solway and the Tweed the Brythons also drove their way, but with less force than in our England. They found themselves among a mixed people of Goidels and Neolithic folk in the Lowlands; and this country, sometimes Brythonic, sometimes Goidelic, ended by having in it an exceedingly mixed race, made up of these two Celtic strains dissolved in a Neolithic infusion; but the Brythonic element was master. Into the north of Scotland the Brythons scarcely penetrated. But wherever they were, their language prevailed. Later on they took the name of Cymry, and the English called them the Welsh. The fate they had given to the Goidels they met with at the hands of the English; until, after a hundred and fifty years of war, the Brythons only existed as a separate people in Devonshire, Cornwall, Wales, and in Strathclyde; that is, in the country which extended from the Ribble through Cumberland and Westmoreland to the Clyde. The Cymry had a literature of their own, and they sang in verse the fortunes of their strife with the English, their own wars with one another, the war-deeds of their chieftains, and the tales of their families. Moreover, they made a host of stories in prose in which they embodied their myths and the legends of their ancestral heroes. Four great bards are said to have flourished among them in the later half of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century. These were Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, and Merddin; and we possess in manuscripts which date from the twelfth to the fourteenth century some of their poems, added to and modernised. They sing the wars of the northern Cymry with the Angles, and of the Cymry of Wales with the West Saxons, in poems by Taliessin and Llywarch Hen. These poems are of the sixth century. In the seventh the poets celebrated the great struggle between the Northumbrians and Cadwallon and his son. This is the first period of Cymric poetry. When the northern kingdom of the Cymry decayed, and they emigrated to South Wales, the old poetry was applied in the tenth century to the new dwelling-place and the new fortunes of the Cymry. This is the second period. Later on a third school of literature arose, poetic in North Wales, and of mythical and romantic tales in South Wales; and these tales are at the root of a great deal of English romance and song up to the present day. A fourth school of poetry, imitative of the old poetry of the north, continued under the Norman-Welsh rule till the days of Henry the Second, when the Black Book of Carmarthen was made up of some of the ancient poetry. In the following centuries the Red Book of Aneurin, the Book of Taliessin, and the Book of Hergest contained some also of the old poetry and of its later imitations. These were mingled with original work of a still later period. There existed then, close to the border-land between the English and the Cymry, a great body of living and growing poetry, and of imaginative story-telling, which could hardly help influencing the Border-English when, after the first fierce years of the Conquest, the Welsh of West Wales, of Wales, and of Cumbria were so often either in alliance with the English or amalgamated with them. The Celtic genius of the Brythons stole in, year by year, into the English of the Border, from Berwick to Carlisle, from Carlisle to Chester, from Chester to Bristol, and from Bristol to Glastonbury and Exeter. When, after the Norman Conquest, the Normans seized a good part of South Wales, the Welsh imagination was interwoven with the Norman passion; and in days still later, after the twelfth century, the fifth period of Welsh poetry, developing itself in lyrics of love and of nature, full of lonely and graceful sentiment, had, as I believe, a well-marked influence on the birth and growth of the earliest English lyrics. As far as we can conjecture, the best of these lyrics were born on the lands of the Severn valley, and the first English poem of imaginative importance after the Conquest-the Brut of Layamon-arose in the heart of one who dwelt at Areley, on the banks of the Severn. There was no such amalgamation in the first hundred and fifty years of the conquest of Britain by the English; the British were ruthlessly slain or driven away. Among those who fled over-sea was the only literary man among the Britons whose name has attained reputation. This was Gildas, whose Latin book, De Excidio, describes the horrors of the first years of the English invasion, and whose Epistola, addressed to the kings and priests of the Britons, is a fierce and probably an exaggerated indictment of their rule and their immoralities. Nevertheless, so far as his slight history goes, he is a sound authority. When,' weary of trouble, he fled to Gaul, founded the Abbaye de Ruis, and died, British culture also died with him. He was not alone in his emigration. Hundreds of Britons took flight from the English sword, and out of this furious expulsion a Brythonic colony arose in France which played its own part in English literature. After the battles of Aylesford and Crayford in 455-57, and for fully a century and a half, the Britons of the southern counties and of South Wales emigrated to Armorica and made Brittany. In that little corner of France the Brythonic traditions, legends, and myths, the imaginative ballads and story-telling of this Celtic race, lived on, and developed in freedom. When the Arthurian legend, which probably began among the northern Cymry (and the first records of which are to be found embedded in the compilation which goes under the name of Nennius-the Historia Britonum), came to South Wales, it got from thence into Brittany, was taken up by Breton bards, freshly worked and added to, and then fell into the hands of the Normans. The Normans, having brought to bear upon it their formative genius, carried it back to South Wales, and then to England; and it was first thrown into clear shape by a dweller in Wales, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who composed into twelve Latin books his History of the Britons, which, begun in 1132, took its final form in 1147. From that day to this, for nearly eight hundred years, the Brythonic story of Arthur has been one of the master-subjects of imaginative literature in |