Throughout the poetry of the Cymric bards you constantly see the severest moral precepts, and the purest pictures of virtuous felicity, mingling in singularly perfect fusion with the most amorous strains. Among the 'Choice Things' of Geraint, the famous Blue Bard, were: A song of ardent love for the lip of a fair maid; A softly sweet glance of the eye, and love without wantonness; A secluded walking-place to caress one that is fair and slender; To reside by the margin of a brook in a tranquil dell of dry soil; A house small and warm, fronting the bright sunshine. With these, versifications of all the virtues and moralities. 'In the whole range of Kymric poetry,' says the learned Thomas Stephens,[134] 'there is not, I venture to assert, a line of impiety.' FOOTNOTE: [134] Vide 'Lit. of the Kymry.' II. The Welsh custom of Bundling, or courting abed, needs no description. The Welsh words sopen and sypio mean a bundle and to bundle, and they mean a squeezed-up mass, and to squeeze together; but there is a further meaning, equivalent to our word baggage, as applied to a strumpet.[135] The custom of bundling is still practised in certain rural neighbourhoods of Wales. To discuss its moral character is not my province in these pages; but I may properly record the fact that its practice is not confined to the irreligious classes. It is also pertinent here to recall the circumstance that among these people anciently, courtship was guarded by the sternest laws, so that any other issue to courtship than marriage was practically impossible. If a maiden forgot her duty to herself, her parents, and her training, when the evil result became known she was to be thrown over a precipice; the young man who had abused the parents' confidence was also to be destroyed. Murder itself was punished less severely. Customs of promiscuous sleeping arose in the earliest times, out of the necessities of existence in those primitive days, when a whole household lay down together on a common bed of rushes strewn on the floor of the room. In cold weather they lay close together for greater warmth, with their usual clothing on. Cæsar's misconception that the ancient Britons were polyandrous polygamists evidently had here its source.