For conference and Cynan shall advance The song of peace and days of happiness." "Their magnificent kingdom Through many ages shall be lost to the Britons; Till in his car shall Cynan come from Britain the Lesser, "Yet shall my prophetic song announce the coming again Again shall they rush to the battle of Camlan, And only seven escape from the three days' conflict. When Cadwaladr takes possession of his throne again, ancient hero as a natural The Germans long be This belief in the reappearance of an deliverer is not peculiar to the Welsh. lieved that Charlemagne would some day awake from his charmed slumber to avenge their wrongs, and unite them in defense of their country; also in the cavern of the Rutli, Tell and his associates only await the proper time to issue forth and stand up for the liberties of Switzerland. The same legend occurs in some form or other in Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and other European countries. Arthur, with his knights around him, lay under a hazel tree on Eryri (Snowdon), in North Wales, all resting on their shields and spears. Most of the romances say that after being wounded at the battle of Camlan, A. D. 542, Arthur was borne away to be healed of his wounds in the fairy land of Avallon, and as Heywood remarks in the work before quoted, "he who shall go into Brittany and shall proclaime that Arthur expired after the ordinary manner of men, most sure he shall be to have bitter and railing language asperst upon him, if he escape a tempestuous shower of stones and brickbats." In A. D. 1278, Eaward I. and his Queen Eleanor went to Glastonbury to discover the remains of Arthur and then reinterred them with great pomp and ceremony, thus hoping to convince the Welsh of the futility of conducting in the future any more rebellions in the name of Arthur. This firm conviction of the Welsh that the predictions of Merlin would all be fulfilled, was sometimes taken advantage of by the English in order to further their own ends. For instance, in the reign of Henry IV., the disaffected earl of March joined his forces with those Owain Glyndwr, so as to strengthen himself against the king. Harry Hotspur, it seems, was often moved to wrath by pretentions of Glyndwr, and when remonstrated with, impatiently cried out. "He angers me With talking of the mold-warp and the ant, And of a dragon and a finless fish, A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven, A crouching lion and a ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble skamble stuff, Others as well as the impetuous young Percy depreciated the prophecies of the great bard and set a higher value on those of Taliesin, for we hear one saying: "A rotton straw I would not give, For a thousand of Merlin's words." But the honor of the seer has been abundantly vindicated— many learned and elaborate commentaries and treatises have been written to prove that nearly every important event in the history of England, the Norman invasion, the deposition of Richard II. and usurpation of Henry of Lancaster, and many others have taken place in strict accordance with his words; and that when the house of Tudor, a race of Welsh princes, ascended the throne of England, then was fulfilled the prophecy that Britain should again bear rule in the land from which she had been driven out, not by force, but by stratagem and treachery. And here it may be remarked that it was by a statute of Henry VIII. that Wales was finally incorporated with England; and by the same act the privileges which of right belonged to the natives of England were given to those born in Wales. Several times reference has been made incidentally to the Triads -that curious and unique collection of facts relating to the mythology, history, jurisprudence and morals of the Welsh people. One more may be given, as it claims Merlin as one of the three primary baptized Bards of Britain. A very thorough and exhaustive work by the Vicomte de la Villemarque, “L' Enchanteur Merlin, Son Histoire, Ses Euvres, Son Influence," treats of Merlin as a mythological, real, legendary, poetical and romantic personage. I do not know whether any English translation of this work exists or not; if not, then any one rendering it into our language would confer a boon on English literature. "My yw rhyfeddod, ni wyr neb fy hanfod." M. A. LLOYD. THE ing nor PHONETIC LAWS AND THEIR LIMITS. HE conception that phonetic changes are regulated and controlled by laws, is one of recent origin, an outgrowth of the modern school of philology. Not as if formerly all changes of sound, which the history of words discloses, had been considered as casual and indiscriminate; it required neither much learnsagacity to discover that letters turn most readily into those which are similarly articulated. But this observation led merely to a theory of "interchangeable letters," which, in conjunction with the well-known etymological figures of syncope, apocope, prosthesis, etc., formed for a long time the dangerous arsenal of etymological knight-errantry. Thus the learned Wachter, in his Glossarium Germanicum, published 1737, in the introduction lays down the neat rule that "cognate letters easily attract each other and easily exchange with each other" (facile permutantur), supporting it with numerous examples, on the whole judiciously chosen. Among them not a few quite correct correspondences are pointed out, e. g., frater and bruder (brother), ferre and bear, cannabis and hanf (hemp), caput and haupt (head), zwerch and dwarf zok and fel, xeira and hiems, opa and fores. But no attempt is made to bring these facts into anything like a system; the permutation theory knows only an exchange of letters, a swaying between similar sounds, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Still more helpless were the older linguists in dealing with the probable causes of the change, omission and occasional accretion of letters. While Varro keeps on the safe side, making "age" responsible for so much havoc (vetustas pauca non depravat, multa tollit), the proud erudition of a later time was inclined to charge the whole mischief to the stupidity of the rabble. Thus a writer of the last century (approvingly quoted by Wachter), while commenting on the many pathological affections of words (apocope, etc.), exclaims with much warmth: "Not a senate of grammarians, not a congress of the learned, have reduced language to its present condition, but an ignorant, mad and ungovernable. rabble. It is this tyrant, more relentless and brutal than a Nero or Busiris, that has maimed, slashed and mangled (mutilavit, laniavit, excarnificavit) the innocent words in a strange and fearful manner, racked and distorted them, while the learned have not even the right to resist." Cconsiderable progress toward the recognition of regularity in phonetic changes was made by Kanne, Jean Paul's genial but erratic friend, who published, in 1804, a book on the relationship of Greek and German, and still more by the learned Erasmus K. Rask, through his "Investigations into the Origin of the old Icelandic Tongue," published 1818. The latter, comparing the two classical languages with the Icelandic, established the correspondence of Graeco-Latin with Icelandic f, of t with th, of k with h, of d with t, of g with k, of ph and ƒ with b, of th with d, of ch with g. (See Raumer: Geschichte der germanischen Philologie, 1870, p. 513). Then came Jacob Grimm, and pointed out not only the parallelism of all these changes, but also the fact that the same phonetic rule which connects the classical stage of sound with the Icelandic and Gothic, again bridges the Gothic and HighGerman. And here we meet for the first time with the distinct enunciation of a Law in the domain of etymology. As it is not intended to dwell on the details of Grimm's system of Lautverschiebung (shifting of sounds), it will suffice to repeat here its abstract formula, leaving out of sight all deviations and particular exceptions. Calling the antique stage (Sanscrit, Greek, Latin), the first grade, the Low-German (Gothic, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon,) the second, the High-German the third, and retaining the time-honored names of smooth, middle and rough for the divisions of mute letters, we have th efollowing table: I. Grade Smooth Middle 3. Grade Middle Rough and Sibilant Rough. Middle. Smooth. The corresponding changes will be found by reading the columns in a downward direction, an example for the first column being Latin tu, Gothic thu, German du; for the second, Latin duo, Gothic tva, German zwei; and for the third, Greek úɣátyp, Gothic dauhtar, German tochter. The fruitful researches of Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp and their co-laborers soon gave to the study of phonetics a very prominent place in the science of language. Phonology, as this new branch was called, became, in fact, the very foundation on which etymology was reconstructed; it bears to the analysis of language a relation similar to that which organic chemistry and microscopic anatomy bear to the branches which treat of the structure and functions of organic bodies. The unsafe custom of applying vague and general rules to all languages alike was superseded by a method carefully discriminating between different fields. For as languages differ in vocabulary and grammatical structure, so they do in their phonetic peculiarities. Two tongues so nearly allied as German and English, are remarkably independent of each other in their method of dealing with questions of euphony. The German word gneiss is called in English nice, as the Romans said notus for gnotus and nixus for gnixus. The transition of s into is in Latin of common occurrence (ara for asa, eram from root es), while in Greeks has a tendency to drop out between vowels. Such peculiarities, dependent on certain habits of articulation, may sometimes reappear on entirely different ground, as, for instance, the change of s into is common in the Norse languages, and even found in English. (Comp. was and were, hare with Gothic haso.) But it would be wrong to assume, bechange has been effected in one language, that it is legitimate in another. In Italian the combined letters ct readily turn cause a into it as in petto from pectus; this fact, however, cannot be used to prove that aritzŋ stands for azizŋ (coastland), for in Greek no assimilation of this kind has been verified. Even in the same one period may endure what another rejects; in the language, |