P Cymmrodor. CONTENTS OF VOL. VIII. Race and Nationality. An Address delivered at the opening of ... Reviews and Notices :- ... Y Llyvyr Coch o Hergest. Y Gyvrol I. The Text of the Mabinogion and other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest. Edited by JOHN RHYS, M.A., and J. Ph.D. With Notes by Professor RHYS ... The Welsh Language in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CALIFORNIA Cymmrodor. VOL. VIII. “CARED DOETH YR ENCILION." ᏢᎪᎡᎢ 1. RACE AND NATIONALITY. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE OPENING OF THE CYMMRODORION SECTION OF THE NATIONAL EISTEDDFOD OF 1886. BY ISAMBARD OWEN, M.D., M.A. MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-Among the books which, in old-fashioned phrase, "should be in every gentleman's library", might, I think, be reckoned the volume of bardic tradition which the Welsh Manuscript Society published in 1862 under the name of Barddas; and this not merely on historical or antiquarian grounds, but for the intrinsic interest of its contents, which abound in sagacious maxims and pithy expressions of wisdom. When the Society of Cymmrodorion did me the honour to ask me to open its series of meetings for 1886, it was to my copy of Barddas that I instinctively turned for a text. On opening the book my eyes fell on a series of questions constituting the commencement of a bardic catechism, which, in Ab Ithel's English rendering, run as follows:— "Who art thou? and tell me thy history. Whence didst thou proceed? and what is thy beginning? Where art thou now? and how camest thou to where thou art? Here, thought I, is wisdom; greater even than his who proclaimed "know thyself" to be the primary rule of life. If Greece revered the author of that famous aphorism, should VOL. VIII. B not Wales give its rate of admiration to its unknown bard, who set these pregnant questions to guard the door of the temple of knowledge? The Greek's immortal phrase is of the ancient philosophy, to which the individual was all in all. The Welsh bard has caught a foretaste of modern science, and warns us that the study of the individual is incomplete without a knowledge of its origin, its course of development, and its relative place in nature. But if we may read these bardic questions in a more mundane light than that in which they were originally intended, it must be confessed that in one respect we have sadly neglected our wise instructor's lesson. The history of the Welsh people has become an almost forgotten study among its members. I do not know if in a single school in all Wales instruction in it is at this day given. This surely should not long be so. The means of such instruction are more available to-day than they were but a few years since; the researches of Professor Rhys have partly dispelled the obscurity in which early British history rested, and at least one excellent elementary text-book has lately seen the light. It may be said that our history is neither very illustrious nor very important to the world. True it is that independent Wales founded no empire and developed no permanent political institution. Empire and policy are not all of life. If history be taken, in the modern sense, as the story of a people and not that of its rulers, the history of the Welsh is devoid neither of interest nor of instruction. To us as Welshmen it is of practical import also. In a day of popular government it is not well that anyone should be ignorant of the due place of himself and his nationality in the world, or unable to estimate the force of arguments drawn from the story of the past. Ethnology till lately was content to classify us as a Celtic |