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and the Scalds, might excite each of them to improve their own native poetry, and to give it all that artificial polish, which they saw admired in the other language. Whoever would understand thoroughly the Poetry of both people, and compare their respective metre, may examine, for the Icelandic, Wormius’s Literatura Runica; and for the British, John David Rhys’s Cambro-Britannicæ Cymraecæve Linguæ institutiones & rudimenta, &c. Lond. 1592[1].]
T.
- ↑ See also some account of the Welsh Poetry in Selden’s Remarks on Drayton’s Poliolbion.——And a remarkable passage in Giraldus Cambrensis (Cambriæ Descriptio, p. 260, 261.) beginning thus, Præ eunctis autem, &c.
or any branch of the Gothic race whatsoever and I believe before the Roman Conquest. Cæsar says, The Druids learned a great number of verses by rote, in which no doubt a great deal of their Morality was couched, and their mystical doctrines about the Oak and the Misseltoe. These kind of Verses are, by the Britons, called Englyn Milwr, or The Warrior’s Song, and consist of a triplet of seven syllables each verse, which are unirythm: For Rhyme is as old as poetry itself, in our language. It is very remarkable, that most of our old Proverbs are taken from the last verse of such a Triplet, and the other two seem almost nonsense; they mention the Oak, high Mountains, and Snow, with honour. Those are certainly remains of the Pagan Creed.”
