The work of the gleaner—Authors of the three most precious relics of Celtic literature, Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, Book of Hymns, and Book of Leinster—of the three Highland treasures, Book of the Dean of Lismore, Fernaig MS., and Book of Clanranald—Advent of Macpherson—Collections and collectors between 1750 and 1820—First printed gleaning—Four nineteenth-century monuments, Campbell’s Leabhar na Feinne, Mackenzie’s Beauties of Gaelic Poetry, Sinclair’s Songster, and Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica—Other recent gleaners and their books.
To the gleaners of the poetic heritage of the past we are indebted almost as much as to the poets themselves; for what mattered it to us that some Homer or Ossian had sung, if none of their contributions ever reached us? An unappreciative age may allow its masterpieces to be lost, but the gleaners will not suffer that. They treasure the best, many a time snatching the fugitive poems from the verge of oblivion.
Sometimes they glean for the pure pleasure of possessing, as the miser amasses his gold. Often they do it to share with others. In any case, like the middlemen of commerce, they are the true distributers, for sooner or later their wares reach the market.
Unlike that of the poet, the work of the gleaner demands no originality; only a certain devotion and enthusiasm for the compositions admired, and a certain critical judgment, the latter not always in evidence, and not necessarily indispensable. Posterity does the winnowing.
To the gleaners we owe the original compiling of the three most precious relics of Celtic literature now in the world—the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre, the Book of Hymns, and the Book of Leinster.
It is away back in the latter end of the eleventh century and early part of the twelfth that we encounter the authors of these. When the gloom of the Middle Ages was settling down upon Europe, and weird apparitions hovered round the camp fires and the cloisters; when the feudal lords were building their strong castles and the men of peace their churches and monastic retreats, to escape from war and disorder and general wickedness, one might enter the precincts of the great monastery of Clonmacnois in Ireland and find Maelmuiri, the son of the son of Conn nam Bocht, busy with his pen compiling the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre. Many times already had the sacred edifice been attacked and pillaged by the marauding Norsemen, and even then it was surrounded by people rendered violent and half savage by the disorders of the time, so that the studious Maelmuiri with his literary tastes was not secure in his quiet retreat, but in the midst of his peaceful avocations was set upon one night in the church and murdered by a band of robbers, to whom literature, most likely, had no meaning.
But Maelmuiri had already reared his monument, more lasting than brass, in the book which happily escaped the hands of the ruffians.
It is the oldest miscellaneous gleaning we have, and contains, among many valuable productions in prose and poetry, such ancient poems as Dallan Forgaill’s “Amra” or “Praise of Columcille,” and a pretty large transcript of the “Táin Bó Chuailgné.” The Gaelic of the former in the Fenian dialect was so ancient even in Maelmuiri’s time that it had to be heavily glossed and commented upon.
Of his contemporary, the compiler of the Book of Hymns, nothing seems to be known. His monument too has survived the ravages and vicissitudes of time, but without his name. A wonderful anthology it is, carrying us back, as in the case of the other, to the days of St Columba, and even further, to the period of St. Patrick. For here, in the Liber Hymnorum, we have the Gaelic hymns of Patrick, Colmán, Fiacc, Ultán, Broccán, Sanctáin, Dallan Forgaill, Máel-ísu, the prayers of Níníne and Adamnan; a Quatrain on the Apostles; besides a variety of beautiful Latin hymns with Gaelic glosses and prefaces. Among the more famous of the latter may be mentioned the “Te Deum,” the “Magnificat,” the “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” and the “Benedictus Dominus Deus Israel,” so well known to worshippers throughout the ages since then; and the three Latin hymns of St. Columba—the “Altus,” “In te Christo,” and “Noli Pater.”
Many of these occur only in the Book of Hymns, except when copied from it elsewhere, and may have been lost to posterity, but for the industry of the unknown gleaner now no more remembered.
Maelmuiri and he, in all probability had made their collection before the close of the eleventh century; and fifty years later appeared the compiler,[39] who produced the Book of Leinster, containing no less than 187 romances in prose and poetry. After the Leabhar Na h’Uidhre this is reckoned the most important monument of Gaelic literature.
The stories recorded relate to events which for the most part happened before the year 650, and their interest and variety may be inferred from the following category of subjects, into which they have been classified, namely: destructions of fortified places, cow-spoils, courtships, battles, cave-stories, voyagings, tragic deaths, feasts, sieges, adventures, elopements, slaughters, water-eruptions, expeditions, progresses, and visions. A book of old-time and abundant human incident is this middle-age document.
In succession to these three master-gleaners there arose numerous other less famous ones in Ireland.
But our special quest carries us over from this time to the land famed in later song and story as the home of the Gaelic tongue. And coming to Scotland three other monuments of Celtic industry and literary taste arise to view, covering the period extending from the fourteenth century to the Forty-five. They are the Book of the Dean of Lismore, the Fernaig MS., and the Book of Clanranald. These having been described in detail in Chapter VII., demand no more than a passing reference here. Happily, more is known of their authors than of the compilers of their famous precursors.
It was in that wild and turbulent period of clan feuds in the Northern and Western Highlands, and family quarrels between the Douglases and their rivals in the Lowlands, almost half a century before the Scottish Reformation, that the Dean of Lismore in his island home near Oban, set about collecting his fund of Gaelic poetry. In 1512, just the year before Flodden, he began to write down what he gleaned from oral recitation throughout the Highlands and Ireland, and continued with the help of his brother down to the year 1526, thus conserving not only the poetry of his own generation and of two previous centuries, but also most beautiful and characteristic fragments of Ossianic poems, some of which, but for him, would have been irretrievably lost.
A hundred and sixty years pass stormfully by before we meet the next gleaner in this field of poetic literature. And then arose among the wild Macraes of Kintail the chief of that name, Donnachadh nam Piòs, full of piety and song. Amid the tumults of the Revolution of 1688, while Claverhouse was leading the clans on to fateful Killiecrankie, and Cannon and Buchan were ravaging the Northern Highlands, this friend of the Muses, and learned chieftain, found a pastime in making of verse and committing to manuscript, thousands of lines of poetry current in his own district, from Carsewell’s day down to his own, and in point of place from Southern Argyllshire north to the borders of Caithness.
This representative gleaning carries the bardic succession over the long interval since the Dean’s time, and it is a pity that though the Fernaig manuscript has been transcribed and annotated by Professor Mackinnon, and again transcribed by Dr. Cameron and Dr. Macbain, and partly transliterated by Dr. Henderson, no English rendering has yet been published.
The poems in the Book of Clanranald are not of the same high order as the earlier survivals, with the exception of the two or three Ossianic fragments, which are likewise to be found elsewhere. But they supplement the Fernaig collection, and help to bring down the poetic tradition nearer the Forty-five. It is to the Macvurichs—the descendants of Muireach Albanach, and the hereditary bards of Clanranald—that we owe this contribution to the gleanings of poetising in by-gone days. They collected throughout their successive generations chiefly elegies and eulogies, from the time of Charles the First to George the Second.
A new era of enthusiasm for bardic compositions opened with the advent of Macpherson and his publication in June 1760 of “Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland.” The rich field of Celtic lore in the past was by this time almost unknown. Few interested themselves in the Celtic literature of their country. The Book of the Dean of Lismore lay in obscurity, nobody now knows where. For centuries it had never been heard of. The Fernaig MS. and the Book of Clanranald were equally buried, perhaps in old clan chests or lumber-rooms. No better evidence of the great dearth in the land of master-gleaners could be adduced than the challenge of Dr. Johnson, that there were not in the whole world Gaelic MSS. one hundred years old, and the feeble way in which it was met.
Interest in these days had reached a very low ebb indeed, when the controversy over Macpherson’s Ossian set the Celts a-searching.
Macpherson himself, first in the field of these newly awakened enthusiasts, is believed, in the course of his journey through the North-West Highlands, to have gleaned the best of what remained of the treasure. But for him it is highly probable there would be no Scottish collection of Gaelic MSS. in the Advocates’ Library to-day. Many of them were already on their way to decay, as their tattered appearance shows.
Besides the work of the Highland Society and the stock in hand of the Kilbride family, it is quite remarkable the number of minor collections that were made between the years 1750 and 1820. This period was, in fact, a resurrected Ossianic cycle. It would be tedious, and quite unnecessary here to catalogue all the names, but we may mention the Turner, the Jerome Stone, the Macnicol, the Fletcher, the Campbell, the Gillies, the Irvine, the Macpherson, the Kennedy, the Sir George Mackenzie, the Sinclair, the Sage, the Macfarlane, the Grant, and the Maccallum collections. And among these gleaners, the baronet, the clergy, the teacher, the farmer, the printer, the soldier, the advocate, the traveller, are all represented.
It is curious now, looking back on the great Macpherson Ossianic controversy, which called forth all this industry, this laborious writing and research, to reflect on its rise and progress. Doubtless it was felt then, as it is recognised now, that the only real way to solve the riddle was to glean in the fields of poetry and history—a task prior to that period too much neglected. They wanted data. Had they the records we now possess, and had they been able to read the ancient scrolls, there would have been no literary wrangle. How quietly and naturally the question, then a problem, has with the advent of scientific scholarship solved itself. As a controversy the Macpherson squabble is now as extinct as the dodo. And the Celtic champions who heralded the dawn of last century, as we did of this, would perhaps be almost as much taken aback with the issue could they know, as with the wonders of steam or electricity and the camera.
It is an interesting fact that the earliest to achieve a printed collection of ancient Gaelic poetry was Ronald Macdonald, son of the Ardnamurchan bard, who published a volume in 1776, presumably from materials treasured by his father.
But if through the past centuries the master gleaners appeared only at rare intervals, the nineteenth has not been thus barren. For almost simultaneously with the Celtic renaissance abroad, enthusiastic harvesters entered the field at home. Four works especially, all produced within the last sixty years, call for particular attention. Following the modern method, their authors have each taken up a special line, ransacking the past and the present for their own peculiar pearls. And thus for the first time the whole Scottish field of Gaelic poetry has been well-nigh gone over, and representative poems of every age and class have been gleaned and printed.
First in the order of the antiquity of its contents, though not first in the field, comes Campbell’s Leabhar na Feinne. It appeared in 1872, its title page announcement sufficiently indicating its aim and scope. As a sub-title, the latter runs as follows:—
copied from old manuscripts preserved at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and from rare books; and orally collected since 1859; with lists of collections and of their contents; and with a short account of the documents quoted.
The author, who was a barrister, and of an ancient and illustrious Highland family in Islay, spent twelve years from 1859 collecting folk-lore and poetry as opportunity offered throughout the Highlands, a work in which he was assisted by various contributors and coadjutors. His first book, entitled Popular Tales of the West Highlands, orally collected, was published in Edinburgh in 1862. There are four volumes, and they contain mainly prose stories, such as were wont to be repeated round the firesides in the Highland Ceilidh in days of yore. Yet, commingled with the Sgeulachdan, are to be found Ossianic fragments which had filtered down by oral tradition.
This publication, however, was but a stepping-stone to the author’s real magnum opus, the Leabhar na Feinne.
For it, he collected about 54,000 lines of heroic poetry, and these it will be observed are independent of the Irish MSS., and almost of the Scottish MSS. written in the Irish character before the year 1512. With regard to the latter he says, “To publish them is more than I am able to do. Where extracts have been made I have quoted a few passages to show what the language is like, and how these ancient writings correspond to later writings.”
Since in many cases he had two or more versions of the same ballad, and in some cases five or six, it was his original intention to collate and make one perfect copy. This idea he had ultimately to abandon, and wisely followed the plan of printing the oldest, with selections from later versions. Of the first Ossianic fragment he attempted to collate from two versions, namely, Garbh Mac Stairn, he says, “not a line of Macpherson’s Gaelic was in either version, but the story seemed to be the foundation of the first book of Fingal, and therefore a literary curiosity.” It is significant that when Campbell issued his first book he favoured the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian, but by the time Leabhar na Feinne appeared he was strong the other way. His early attitude he attributed to “unformed opinions affected by old beliefs.”
The ballads of Leabhar na Feinne are arranged under nine heads, according to their chronological sequence, as follows:—
These heroic tales read like the Arabian Nights, often with the exaggerated fancy of Don Quixote. The extraordinary variety and human interest of the ballads may be gleaned even from their names. For example: The Story of Cuchulinn and Eimer, his wife; his sword; his chariots; Garbh Mac Stairn; and Conlaoch; and Connal’s revenge. The Story of Fionn and his Feinn; his pedigree; stories about his birth; Ossian and Padruig; Ossian’s last hunt; how he got his sight; the loss of the Fenian history; Ossian’s controversy with Padruig; his lament for his comrades; their names; their favourite music; how nine went forth to seek a whelp. Caoilte; how he slew a magic boar and a giant.
The following would pass as the titles of chapters in the great classic of Cervantes: The adventure with the timbrel player; With Silhalan; The adventure of the hag; The stealing of Fionn’s cup; The adventure with the enchanter’s family; Roc, the King’s one-legged runner; The smithy song, how they got swords; The one-eyed giantess and her ships; The battle with Manus; Fionn’s expedition to Lochlan; His puzzle; His enchantment in the rowan booth; The adventure of the nine with a horseman; The adventure in the house of the king of the fair strangers; The Black Dog slain by Bran; The adventure of the six at the golden castle; The tightest fight of the Feinn; The expedition of eight or of the six to foreign lands; The distressed maiden; The battle of Fair Strand, in which the Feinn defeated the whole world in arms; The maid of the fair white garment; Ossian’s courting; How Bran was killed and Gaul’s dog; Fionn’s encounter of wits with Ailbhe, Cormac’s daughter; The elopement of Grainne, Fionn’s wife, with Diarmad, Fionn’s nephew; Diarmad’s lament for his comrades; The story of Gaul Macmorna; his adventure with Lamh-fhad; Gaul’s last words to his wife.
The parodies have these headings: The black wrapper; A dream; The tailor and the Feinn; The truiseal stone; Diarmad’s speech.
Among later heroical ballads occur subjects like these: The lay of the great fool; Oscar and the giant; Muirchadh Mac Brian and the heiress of Dublin; Muirchadh Mac Brian’s riding dress; Hugh O’Neil’s horse.
Such sumptuous narrative, spiced with no lack of imaginative detail, might satisfy even Chaucer’s merry group as they foregathered to listen to the story-telling at the Tabard Inn centuries ago.
In 1841, some thirty years before Leabhar na Feinne, Mackenzie’s Beauties of Gaelic Poetry appeared. It is a work of more general interest than the other, in so far that it gives gems of every type of poem. Here are to be found in concise compass the best productions of the best bards during the last 300 years, with brief biographical sketches, critical and explanatory notes, and other elucidations.
John Mackenzie, the compiler, was born in 1806 of humble parentage in Gairloch, Ross-shire. Educated in the parish school there, and afterwards at Tain Academy, he developed a taste for reading and music, and became very proficient in the making of musical instruments. His father had him started in life as an apprentice joiner in Dingwall. This occupation he soon left, however, for more congenial literary work, such as the collecting of poetical material for publication. On leaving his native strath to push his way in the great cities of the South, he acted for a time as book-keeper in the Glasgow University printing office, and in addition to compiling “The Beauties,” wrote much in prose. Afterwards the late Gaelic publishers, Maclachlan and Stewart, Edinburgh, employed him on various undertakings for several years. Besides “The Beauties” he wrote a “History of Prince Charlie,” the English-Gaelic Dictionary, usually bound with Macalpine’s, the “Gaelic Melodist,” and compiled, wrote, translated, or edited under surprising difficulties, about thirty other works.
A man of talent and industry, Mackenzie has produced a book which not only enhances the prestige of our native literature, but also places himself in the front rank of Gaelic gleaners.
Like the Dean of Lismore, however, he has inserted certain matters which critics feel might, with advantage, be omitted, as they detract from the dignity of the work as a whole.
On the other hand, the author of Leabhar na Feinne feels aggrieved that Mackenzie has not included among “The Beauties” some of the ancient heroic ballads of Ossianic origin. As well might objection be taken to Mr. Campbell himself for omitting the heroic poetry in the Irish MSS. and the Scottish MSS. written in the old Gaelic script. As a matter of fact, Mackenzie does give as samples three very beautiful pieces, the “Mordubh,” “Collath,” and “The Aged Bard’s Wish,” which he took to be ancient, but which are now held to belong to the Macpherson period.
Both compilers did well to follow each his own plan and work out his own ideal. The field has thus been all the better harvested.
Mackenzie’s undertaking seems to have early undermined his health, and though usually resident in the South, he died at Inverewe on the 19th day of August 1848, among his own people, and was buried with his fathers in the old chapel in the churchyard of Gairloch, near which, at the roadside, a monument now stands to his memory.
A few specimen extracts from “The Beauties” may here be quoted to illustrate their quality. Of the three earlier poems “The Aged Bard’s Wish” is the best known, and of it our author gives both the text and a literal translation. It was Mrs. Grant of Laggan who first brought it under public notice, and then it was considered ancient because there is no flavour of Christianity in its composition. On the contrary, the bard desires entrance at death into the hall where dwell Ossian and Daol, and expresses the wish that there be laid by his side at the last a harp, a shell full of liquor, and his ancestor’s shield. In other respects both the language and sentiment are modern.
Of Macintyre’s “Ben Dorain,” which is also included, Professor Blackie says, “I shall be surprised to learn that there exists in any language, ancient or modern, a more original poem of the genus which we may call venatorial. What Landseer, in a sister art, has done for animals in general, that Macintyre, in this singular work, has done for the deer and the roe.” And then Blackie himself gives a characteristic rendering into English of the poem, very free, but catching the spirit of its Gaelic author. For example:—
At the end of the book Mackenzie gives a select number of “Beauties” by individuals who invoked the muse only on rare occasions, or whose history is little known to the world. Among these we find the anonymous yet exquisitely beautiful and pathetic “Mali Bheag Òg.” Our author claims to be the first to give the whole of it correctly in print.[40] There is much uncertainty as to the history, circumstance, and locality, but the occasion of the poem was the elopement of two lovers, who were pursued. The gallant, a young officer, stood to the defence of his beautiful fiancée, who stole behind him in the melée. Unhappily his sword accidentally in the swing struck her so violent a blow that she expired at his feet. It was in jail awaiting execution that he composed this heart-melting song:—
As another independent gleaning, and valuable supplement to Mackenzie’s work, there falls to be mentioned Archibald Sinclair’s An T’ Oranaiche, or the Gaelic Songster, published in 1879. “If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation,” said a wise man. And certainly the songs occupy no mean place in Celtic life and poetry. Of these there is no collection in Gaelic like Sinclair’s—humorous, patriotic, satiric, and sentimental. He gleaned, as he tells us, in many a field, saving some from oblivion. Others he snatched from fugitive pieces of paper, ere these latter became food for the moth. In all there are 290 songs in the volume, and upwards of fifty names of composers, some of whom are still living. The songs are mainly of last century, and were compiled in Glasgow by their editor, who was a publisher in that city.
By the well-known gleaners above mentioned, the heroic ballads, the lyric poems, and the songs have been securely garnered. But there still remained one large section of the field from which hitherto there had been no great ingathering, necessary to complete the harvest up to our time. And happily, ere the century closed, the crowning work appeared. It is a remarkable book and sumptuous, published in two volumes, in 1900, by Alexander Carmichael, who was for many years a member of Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue staff, and an enthusiastic admirer of Gaelic lore. The work is styled “Carmina Gadelica,—hymns and incantations, with illustrative notes on words, rites, and customs, dying and obsolete; orally collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and translated into English,” by the author. Undoubtedly it places the compiler in the very front rank of Celtic gleaners, and will carry its testimony forward to posterity, as a monument of a phase of thought and life now passing away. Even already its weird and old-world “ortha, urnan agus ubagan,” sound like the echoes of a far-off time, from which the race has long since emerged.
Yet its cultured author tells us that this work consists of old lore collected during the last forty-four years, forming but a small part of a large mass of oral literature written down from the recital of men and women throughout the land of the Gael, from Arran to Caithness, and from Perth to St. Kilda. The greater portion, however, was made in the Western Isles, the last refuge of the distinctive Celtic life “expiring on the horizon before the growing tumult of uniform civilisation.”
For three centuries Gaelic oral literature has been disappearing, and, as our author tells us, it is now becoming meagre in quantity, inferior in quality, and greatly isolated.
“Several causes have contributed towards this decadence,” he says, “principally the Reformation, the rebellions, the evictions, the Disruption, the schools, and the spirit of the age. Converts in religion, in politics, or in aught else are apt to be intemperate in speech and rash in action. The Reformation movement condemned the beliefs and cults tolerated and assimilated by the Celtic Church and the Latin Church. Nor did sculpture and architecture escape their intemperate zeal. The rebellions harried and harassed the people, while the evictions impoverished, dispirited, and scattered them over the world. Ignorant school teaching and clerical narrowness have been painfully detrimental to the expressive language, wholesome literature, manly sports, and interesting amusements of the Highland people.”
Mr. Carmichael has classified the contents of his extensive gleaning under the following five sub-titles: Invocations, Seasons, Labour, Incantations, Miscellaneous, and in the general introduction explains his mode of gathering the materials.
The glimpses of Highland life he gives in connection with his visits and colloquies with the people are highly interesting.
“Whatever be the value of this work,” he says, “it is genuine folk-lore, taken down from the lips of men and women, no part being copied from books. It is the product of far-away thinking, come down on the long stream of time. Who the thinkers and whence the stream, who can tell? Some of the hymns may have been composed within the cloistered cells of Deny and Iona, and some of the incantations among the cromlechs of Stonehenge and the standing stones of Callarnis. These poems were composed by the learned, but they have not come down through the learned, but through the unlearned—not through the lettered few, but through the unlettered many, through the crofters and cottars, the herdsmen and shepherds of the Highlands and Islands.”
“The poems were generally intoned in a low, recitative manner, rising and falling in slow modulated cadences, charming to hear but difficult to follow. The music of the hymns had a distinct individuality, in some respects resembling and in many respects differing from the old Gregorian chants of the Church. I greatly regret that I was not able to record this peculiar and beautiful music, probably the music of the old Celtic Church.”
Following the advice and example of his acquaintance, J. F. Campbell of Islay, whom he knew for a quarter of a century, Mr. Carmichael gives the words and names of the reciters. But, unlike Campbell and Mackenzie and Sinclair, he gives an English rendering of the original in every instance. Thus, while to the vast majority of this nation their felicitous poems are locked up in the Gaelic, his are available to all, in chaste and beautiful language, with charming letterpress, embellished by old Celtic letters, artistically copied by his wife from the ancient MSS. in Edinburgh and elsewhere.
Speaking of the original, he maintains that, although in decay, the poems are in verse of a high order, with metre, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and every quality to please the ear and to instruct the mind. Simple dignity, charming grace, passionate devotion, characterise most of these pieces. Again and again he laid down his self-imposed task, feeling unable to render the intense power and supreme beauty of the original Gaelic into adequate English; but he persevered, thus placing a stone as it were upon the cairn of those who composed and of those who transmitted the work.
And now, a few characteristic specimens from the book may fitly close this study. The first is an incantation beginning:—
But scarcely any English can convey the vengeance of the vernacular. Even the sounds are terrifying:—
Next, we quote two verses from “The Invocation of the Graces,” interesting as containing beautiful names from the ancient sagas:—
Now follows an example of a charm for sprain:—
And, finally, we may take this as a good specimen of an invocation:—
In recent years, Dr. George Henderson has done useful work in transliterating several poems from the Fernaig MS., which, along with many songs collected in the West Highlands, he has published in his Leabhar nan Gleann. And to Henry Whyte and Malcolm Macfarlane the Gael is indebted for an extensive gleaning in the field of vocal music. In addition to numerous Gaelic melodies, they have rescued a variety of excellent songs from impending oblivion and enhanced their value, especially to those who are unacquainted with the original, by giving literal renderings in English, which serve to exhibit their simple beauty.
Nor have the three sister nationalities been behind in work of this kind. The first important Irish gleaning has been Miss Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, consisting of heroic poems, odes, elegies, and songs, which she published in the original with English translations and notes, Dublin, 1789. In more recent times we have the interesting collections in English of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. Hyde, Dr. Sigerson, Yeats, and others, besides the Treasury of Irish Poetry lately edited by Stopford A. Brooke, and T. W. Rolleston. The latter deals simply with the nineteenth century, but Dr. Sigerson’s Bards of the Gael and Gall is an Anthology of nearly a hundred and fifty poems metrically translated, “covering the ground from the earliest unrhymed chant ascribed to the first invading Milesian down to the peasant days of the eighteenth century.”
Wales is well represented by the extensive Myvyrian Archaiology of Owen Jones, 1801–1807, which capable Welshmen, such as Aneurin Owen, Thomas Price, William Rees, John Jones and others, set themselves to finish; while M. de la Villemarqué has done for Brittany, in his now famous books, perhaps all the ancient gleaning it was possible to do at a period so late as the middle of last century.