troversy. On the other hand, it is certain that it lasted many centuries after Maelgwn's death; for even in the fourteenth century the bardic or semi-pagan school was sufficiently vigorous to elicit a bitter denunciation from a Welsh priest and poet, Siôn Kent, who treats it as consisting of the Men of Hu, whose muse was the genius of lying as distinguished from the better muse that was of Christ.[1] Kent's words briefly indicate with sufficient clearness the nature of the charge which a Christian poet would bring against the semi-pagan bards of the Taliessin school. The latter retaliate, in the assumed person of Taliessin, by charging the others with gross ignorance of the mysteries of bardism. Thus Taliessin now and then propounds to them and to the monks long lists of questions, mostly of an impossible and unanswerable kind, but all asserted to lie within the limits of his personal knowledge; for he has gone through all sorts of transformations, and has in some form or other assisted at all the great events through which the world has passed since its beginning. He challenges them also to prophesy to their patron, thereby intending them to fathom their inferiority to him, who can tell all that is to happen till the end of the world. In a word, his pretensions are of the most extravagant kind, and cannot well have been surpassed by those of the druids in the days of their greatest power in Erinn and Mona, or by those of the boldest sorcerer among the savages of modern times.
The only pretensions closely resembling Taliessin's, and decidedly of the same origin as his, known to me in
- ↑ See the original, quoted in Pughe's Dictionary, s.v. Hu.
