stood still listening. Far out in the desert the red flash of rifles cut through the white moonlight; again the quick flare and then again silence. At last through the night drifted the sound of a wild song, faint and far away, rhythmic, elemental as the night and the desert. I waited in complete uncertainty as to what was approaching, and it was not until they were close upon us that we recognised our own Arabs and Fattuh in their midst. They came on, still singing, with their rifles over their shoulders; their white garments gleamed under the moon; they wore no kerchiefs upon their beads, and their black hair fell in curls about their faces. Ma'ashi,' I cried, 'what happened?' Ma'ashi shook his hair out of his eyes. 'There is nothing, my lady khan. 'Ali saw some men lurking in the desert at the 'asr [the hour of afternoon prayer] and we watched after dark from the walls.' 'They were raiders of the Beni Dhafi'a,' said Ghanim, mentioning a particular lawless tribe. 'Fattuh,' said I, ' did you shoot?' 'We shot,' replied Fattuh-did not your Excellency hear?-and one man is wounded.' A wild-looking boy held out his hand, on which I detected a tiny scratch. There is no harm,' said I. 'Praise God!' 'Praise God!' they repeated, and I left them laughing and talking eagerly, and went to bed and to sleep. Next morning I questioned Fattuh as to the events of the night, but he was exceptionally non-committal. 'My lady,' said he, 'God knows. 'Ali says that they were men of the Beni Dhafi'a.' Then with a burst of confidence he added, 'But I saw no one.' 'At whom did you shoot?' said I in bewilderment. 'At the Beni Dhafi'a,' answered Fattuh, surprised at the stupidity of the question. I gave it up, neither do I know to this hour whether we were or were not raided in the night. Two days later my plan was finished. I had turned one of the vaulted rooms of the stable into a workshop, and spreading a couple of waterproof sheets on the sand for table, had drawn it out to scale lying on the ground. Sometimes an Arab came in silently and stood watching my pencil, until the superior attractions of the next chamber, in which sat the muleteers and the zaptiehs, drew him away. As I added up metres and centimetres I could hear them spinning long yarns of city and desert. Occasionally Ma'ashi brought me coffee. 'God give you the reward,' said I. 'And your reward,' he answered. Only the daughter of kings could write such a picture.' The day we left Kheidhar, the desert was wrapped in the stifling dust of a west wind. I have no notion what the country is like through which we rode for seven hours to Kerbela, and no memory, save that of the castle walls fading like a dream into the haze, of a bare ridge of hill to our right hand and the bitter waves of a salt lake to our left, and of deep sand through which we were driven by a wind that was the very breath of the Pit. Then out of the mist loomed the golden dome of the shrine of Hussein, upon whom be peace, and few pious pilgrims were gladder than I when we stopped to drink a glass of tea at the first Persian tea-shop of the holy city. GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL. Art. 3.-EARLY WELSH POETRY. 1. Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, translated into English, etc. By Evan Evans. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764. 2. The Four Ancient Books of Wales. By W. F. Skene. Two vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868. 3. The Literature of the Kymry. By Thomas Stephens. Second edition. London: Longmans, 1876. 4. The Black Book of Carmarthen. Reproduced and edited by J. Gwenogvryn Evans, M.A., D.Litt. Printed at the Editor's Private Press, 1907. renown THE early singers of no other race, perhaps, enjoy a so tantalisingly disproportionate to what is known of their actual work and personal history as the ancient bards of the Kymry. Taliesin, Aneirin, Llywarch the Old, Merlin, and the rest, are, to the average English reader of poetry, but SO many fantastic and fabulous names. Even to the mass of their own countrymen in Wales, one fears, they are not much more. The most famous of them by name, 'the sage enchanter Merlin,' who cuts so brave a figure in the medieval literature of wizardry, is the most difficult among them all to identify and accredit as a poet. To the modern world Merlin is all but a creature of pure myth-an alleged bard of the sixth century, who, transformed into a prophet and a magician, comes to be imported into the Arthurian legends to lend the necessary touch of weird mystery to the story of Arthur's birth. The 'great Taliesin,' again, whom Gray invokes to hear, 'out of the grave,' strains that breathe a soul to animate his clay,' has left behind him few, if any, songs in which we can be sure that we hear his own authentic strains. Aneirin has fared somewhat better at the hand of time, and of the critics; a celebrated elegiac poem is, with some confidence, ascribed to him. Yet, scanty and insecure though the evidence is which enables us to regard these men as bards of the sixth century at all, the traditions of 'the bardic order' in Wales extend further back even than their era. For the group of bards of which Taliesin 6 is the fabled head are alleged to have inherited their poetic art and craft from the nameless Druids of preRoman Britain. Whatever the truth about the poetry of the Druids may be, their right to a place in the temple of Fame is certainly indefeasible, for Roman historians of the first repute bear testimony to their prestige and power among the ancient Celts. So well established, indeed, is their renown that they have been admitted even to the Comtist Calendar, where, with Ossian-another spirit called out of the vasty deeps of Celtic tradition-they figure among the primitive heroes of theocratic civilisation.' The religious culture of the Druids has been the subject of much ingenious, and not unfruitful, speculation. Their alleged proficiency in the art of poetry has been no less eagerly, though, perhaps, not quite so dispassionately and profitably debated. tradition, dating back to a very early time, includes A persistent poetical inspiration among the gifts of the Druids. When Milton, in Lycidas,' reproaches the Muses for having deserted their playground 'on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,' he is echoing a traditional association which is at least as old as Lucan. Milton, indeed, has much to answer for on the score of this familiar line. It contributed as much as, if not more than, anything else to the use, in the eighteenth century, of the term 'druid' as a synonym for poet or bard. The mid-eighteenth century poets, especially those who deliberately imitated Milton, discovered in druid' a word full of a vague romantic charm. Hence even James Thomson, who had so unromantic a conceit of his outward appearance, at least, as to describe himself as more fat than bard beseems,' is dignified by Collins with this name in the well-known elegy beginning In yonder grave a Druid lies.' Mason, in his dramatic poem Caractacus' (1759), makes a The passage in the 'Pharsalia' (book i, 447 seq.), in which the Bards and the Druids are linked together, is well known. Druid the choragus of a band of British bards; while 6 A terrible sagacity informs The poet's heart,' tells us unhesitatingly that not only but that ' in a Roman mouth the graceful name Of prophet and of poet was the same,' 'British poets, too, the priesthood shared, And every hallowed Druid was a bard.' Poetic usage dies hard; and, in modern times, so unconventional a singer as Browning cannot help making the Druid both bard and priest, as when, in 'The Two Poets of Croisic,' he says: 'boys from door to door Sing unintelligible words to tunes As obsolete; " scraps of Druidic lore," Sigh scholars, as each pale man importunes Vainly the mumbling to speak plain once more.' 6 6 When all is told, however, modern scholarship will have it that no single scrap of Druidic lore' in poetry has come down to us, and that we possess no authentic evidence whatever of the bardic culture of the Druids. There is no proof,' say the authors of The Welsh People,'* of any formal connexion between the Druidic priesthood and the bardic system as it appears in Wales in the twelfth century.' And it is to the twelfth century that those Mss. belong which furnish us with our first considerable body of authentic remains of the early poetry of the Kymry. 'In the twelfth century,' wrote Matthew Arnold long ago, there began for Wales, along with another burst of national life, another burst of poetry; and this burst literary in the stricter sense of the word-a burst which left, for the first time, written records. It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well as of itself.' These records, he continues, 'touch that primitive world of which they profess to be the voice,' and the true critic is not he * By Sir John Rhys and Sir D. Brynmor-Jones (first ed., p. 255). |