An inexhaustible fertility of invention was displayed by the Celtic makers. They created the cycle of Conchobar, and afterwards that of Ossian, to which Macpherson's "adaptations" gave such world-wide renown that in our own century they directed Lamartine's early steps towards the realms of poetry. Later still they created the cycle of Arthur, most brilliant and varied of all, a perennial source of poetry, from whence the great French poet of the twelfth century sought his inspiration, and whence only yesterday the poet laureate of England found his. They collect in Wales the marvellous tales of the "Mabinogion"[20]; in them we find enchanters and fairies, women with golden hair, silken raiment, and tender hearts. They hunt, and a white boar starts out of the bushes; following him they arrive at a castle there, "where never had they seen trace of a building before." Pryderi ventures to penetrate into the precincts: "He entered and perceived neither man, nor beast; no boar, no dogs, no house, no place of habitation. On the ground towards the middle there was a fountain surrounded by marble, and on the rim of the fountain, resting on a marble slab, was a golden cup, fastened by golden chains tending upwards, the ends of which he could not see. He was enraptured by the glitter of the gold, and the workmanship of the cup. He drew near and grasped it. At the same instant his hands clove to the cup, and his feet to the marble slab on which it rested. He lost his voice, and was unable to utter a word." The castle fades away; the land becomes a desert once more; the heroes are changed into mice; the whole looks like a fragment drawn out of Ariosto, by Perrault, and told by him in his own way to children. No wonder if the descendants of these indefatigable inventors are men with rich literatures, not meagre literatures of which it is possible to write a history without omitting anything, but deep and inexhaustible ones. The ends of their golden chains are not to be seen. And if a copious mixture of Celtic blood flows, though in different proportions, in the veins of the French and of the English, it will be no wonder if they happen some day to produce the greater number of the plays that are acted, and of the novels that are read, all over the civilised world. III.