Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Translations Into English Verse From the Poems of Davyth Ap Gwilym, a Welsh Bard of the Fourteenth Century
Habituated to regard the martial spirit of their countrymen as the only bulwark against foreign oppression, they naturally selected the single virtue of military prowess as the great subject of their eulogy and their songs. Hence it was, that with the destruction of their country's freedom, they appear to have lost the only object of their art and the sole source of their inspiration; and nearly a century elapsed before we find any symptoms of its reviving in?uence. To this result other causes must have powerfully contributed: the jealous policy of the English authorities, by whom the bards were justly viewed as the great promoters of a spirit of inde pendence among the people; the fanaticism of the mendicant friars, who appear to have denounced many of the refinements and amusements of life as at variance with Christianity; and, above all, that general feeling of fear and despondency, which always pervades a recently subjugated nation, and destroys all sympathy with the joyous songs of the minstrel.
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