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nothing daunted and she went in. And as she went in, she perceived Pryderi laying hold of the bowl, and she went towards him.

"

O my lord," said she, "what dost thou do here?" And she took hold of the bowl with him, and as she did so her hands became fast to the bowl, and her feet to the slab, and she was not able to utter a word. And with that, as it became night, lo, there came thunder upon them, and a fall of mist, and thereupon the castle vanished, and they with it.

Another story, complete in itself, concerns the fate of Blodeuwedd. Gwydion, the brother of Math, lord of Gwynedd, was a famous Tribe-herdsman, who had magical power. He wished to find a wife for his nephew Llew, but he could not because Arianrod, Math's wife, hated the youth, and had laid a "destiny" on him that no human being could marry him. In his distress, Gwydion appealed to Math, who solved the problem by

saying:

"Well, we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. He has come now to man's stature, and he is the comeliest youth that was ever beheld." So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized1 her and gave her the name of Blodeuwedd.

Unfortunately, the wedding was not followed by a happy life, and presently, Blodeuwedd persuaded Llew's rival to slay him, through knowledge which she treacherously gained. As the dart of Gronw struck Llew "he flew up in the form of an eagle, and gave a fearful scream. And thenceforth he was no more seen." That, however, is not the story's end: treachery was only successful for the moment. Rumours reached Math and Gwydion, and the latter set out to discover if he could what had really befallen his nephew :

These tidings reached Math the son of Mathonwy. And heaviness and grief came upon Math, and much more upon Gwydion than upon him. "Lord," said Gwydion, " I shall never rest until I have

1 These ancient stories, originally composed before Christian times, were, later, constantly written down or copied by Christian scribes, who occasionally put in Christian touches and details.

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tidings of my nephew." "Verily," said Math, may Heaven be thy strength." Then Gwydion set forth and began to go forward. And he went through Gwynedd and Powys to the confines. And when he had done so, he went unto Arvon, and came to the house of a vassal, in Mænawr Penardd. And he alighted at the house, and stayed there that night. The man of the house and his household came in, and last of all came there the swineherd. Said the man of the house to the swineherd, "Well, youth, hath thy sow come in to-night?" "She hath," said he, "and is this instant returned to the pigs." "Where doth this sow go to ?" said Gwydion. "Every day, when the sty is opened, she goeth forth and none can catch sight of her, neither is it known whither she goeth more than if she sank into the earth." "Wilt thou grant unto me," said Gwydion, "not to open the sty until I am beside the sty with thee ?" "This will I do, right gladly," he answered.

That night they went to rest, and as soon as the swineherd saw the light of day, he awoke Gwydion. And Gwydion arose and dressed himself, and went with the swineherd and stood beside the sty. Then the swineherd opened the sty. And as soon as he opened it, behold she leaped forth, and set off with great speed. And Gwydion followed her, and she went against the course of a river, and made for a brook, which is now called Nant y Llew. And there she halted and began feeding. And Gwydion came under the tree, and looked what it might be that the sow was feeding on.

And he saw that she

was eating putrid flesh and vermin. Then looked he up to the top of the tree, and as he looked he beheld on the top of the tree an eagle, and when the eagle shook itself, there fell vermin and putrid flesh from off it, and these the sow devoured. And it seemed to him that the eagle was Llew. And he sang an Englyn:

"Oak that grows between the two banks;
Darkened is the sky and hill !
Shall I not tell him by his wounds,
That this is Llew?"

Upon this the eagle came down until he reached the centre of the tree. And Gwydion sang another Englyn:

"Oak that grows in upland ground;

Is it not wetted by the rain? Has it not been drenched
By nine score tempests ?

It bears in its branches Llew Llaw Gyffes."

Then the eagle came down until he was on the lowest branch of the tree, and thereupon this Englyn did Gwydion sing:

"Oak that grows beneath the steep;

Stately and majestic is its aspect!

Shall I not speak to it?

That Llew will come to my lap ?'

And the eagle came down upon Gwydion's knee. And Gwydion struck him with his magic wand, so that he returned to his own form. No one ever saw a more piteous sight, for he was nothing but skin and bone.

Then he went unto Caer Dathyl, and there were brought unto him good physicians that were in Gwynedd, and before the end of the year he was quite healed.

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Lord," said he unto Math the son of Mathonwy, " it is full time now that I have retribution of him by whom I have suffered all this woe." "Truly," said Math, "he will never be able to maintain himself in the possession of that which is thy right." "Well," said Llew, "the sooner I have my right, the better shall I be pleased."

Then, they called together the whole of Gwynedd, and set forth to Ardudwy. And Gwydion went on before and proceeded to Mur y Castell. And when Blodeuwedd heard that he was coming, she took her maidens with her and fled to the mountain. And they passed through the river Cynvael, and went towards a court that there was upon the mountain, and through fear they could not proceed except with their faces looking backwards, so that unawares they fell into the lake. And they were all drowned except Blodeuwedd, and her Gwydion overtook. And he said unto her, "I will not slay thee, but I will do unto thee worse than that. For I will turn thee into a bird; and because of the shame thou hast done unto Llew Llaw Gyffes, thou shalt never show thy face in the light of day henceforth; and that through fear of all the other birds. For it shall be their nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee. And thou shalt not lose thy name, but shalt always be called Blodeuwedd." Now Blodeuwedd is an owl in the language of this present time, and for this reason is the owl hateful unto all birds. And even now the owl is called Blodeuwedd.

In the fourteenth century, during the long reign of Edward III, and at the beginning of Richard II's reign, the Christian religion inspired and stimulated several great writers of prose, and particularly one Yorkshireman, Richard Rolle, who with Walter Hilton and Mother Julian of Norwich left us very beautiful books full of teaching and devotion. Richard Rolle's prose is not only almost the earliest continuous writing in English, but it has a lovely musical cadence. In this century another remarkable man, William Langland, managed to throw off foreign influences and wrote a long poem called The Vision of Piers the Plowman, which gives us a vivid picture of the doings and thoughts of our forefathers, not only those of the " important" people, but of the quite ordinary very average folk, who must always make up the bulk and real body of any nation.

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the love of learning which had risen up in Italy made itself felt in France, and then in England. Literature began to flourish, and the influence of Italian thought, stories, character-drawing, began to appear, in England, and can be seen very easily in such poems as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in spite of their English setting and homely English fun; and especially in Sonnets, such as Sir Philip Sidney's and Shakespeare's. This Italian influence continued through the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, and was equally visible in poems, plays, and in essays and other prose forms.

Then during the Civil War under Charles I, prose took another shape; both Cavaliers and Roundheads wrote controversial pamphlets, swords and words alike came handy as weapons to the fighters on both sides.

But in the midst of all the noise of war, there was born in the later half of the seventeenth century a taste for beautiful, gentle, reflective, peaceful poetry, than which no century has brought forth any more fragrant, and more lovely in its own particular kind. It may be that the tumult and horror of war caused it, in one of those "reactions," as we call them, which are moods of escape into the exact opposite of the circumstances naturally around us.

The eighteenth century produced the liveliest and, on the whole, the bitterest satires written in English. But we must remember that the satire goes very far back in English Literature; for instance, The Land of Cockayne was written in 1268. The plays written at this time were mostly prose comedies. The century is also distinguished by the production of much prose, on all sorts of subjects-religion, government, social life, the working of the human mind, morals, the affairs of trade and so forth. Perhaps we may say that it was a very "grown-up" century; and the greater part of the books written were certainly not meant for, nor likely to entertain, children.

The nineteenth century began with a great outburst of youthful work, as if people had tired of being chilly and elderly. The rising tide of song swelled as the years passed on, and with it, and beside it, grew up an immense variety of essays, treatises, novels, histories, biographies: though a great number of plays were written and played at the theatres, nothing great, like the drama which began with Kit Marlowe and was carried on by Shakespeare, and died away after the days of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher and Webster, was produced; nothing which was even to be compared with the witty drama of the Restoration days, when Charles II was King. The reason may be that many more novels were written, and that the writers of Queen Victoria's days found themselves more at home writing these than making plays.

With this very short and sketchy general outline of the growth of English Literature we must be content, and turn to the literature itself, dealing with it under the several forms which I tried earlier in this chapter to describe. But one of these forms-that of the novelcannot be treated here. Extracts from any novel would be but an example of prose. A novel is a developing story, and if it is worth telling, it cannot be usefully represented by small bits cut out of it, however beautiful in themselves such fragments may be.

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