The compositions attributed to the oldest Welsh bards have come down to us in MSS which date from the twelfth to the end of the fourteenth century; the best known of them are four in number, and these were edited long ago, with translations, by the late Dr W. F. Skene under the title of _The Four Ancient Books of Wales_.[47] It is unnecessary here to touch upon controversial questions affecting the antiquity and the genuineness of the poems contained in these MSS. Many of them are, plainly enough, not much older than the date of the compilation of the particular MS in which they are found. Others, however, as plainly contain what Matthew Arnold,[48] speaking of the prose _Mabinogion_, calls “a _detritus_ of something far older,” and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that some of them refer to historical events and personages of the sixth and seventh centuries, while others contain mythological matter derived from a much remoter age. Here, the references to Arthur in these poems alone concern us. They are strangely few in number, and tantalisingly brief. In _The Black Book of Carmarthen_ he is mentioned five times, in _The Book of Aneirin_ only once. He is the central figure in a remarkable poem in _The Book of Taliesin_, and his name occurs in one other poem in that MS; in the poetry of _The Red Book of Hergest_ nothing is heard of him, except in a poem called ‘Gereint, son of Erbin,’ which is also found in _The Black Book_. Three of the references in _The Black Book_ are of the briefest character. In one poem[49] the bard tells us that he “has been where Llacheu, the son of Arthur, was slain,” and that is all; in another, evidently a late poem, we hear of “Arthur’s host,” or “retinue” (_teulu Arthur_)[50]; while in a stanza, already alluded to, in “The Songs of the Graves,” we are told that his grave is unknown. In the solitary passage in which his name occurs in _The Book of Aneirin_ he is a standard of comparison,--a certain warrior is described as being “an Arthur in the exhaustive conflict”[51]; the second of the two poems in which he is mentioned in _The Book of_ _Taliesin_ refers, without comment or description, merely to “Arthur’s steed.”[52] There remain to be noticed the three poems which, alone, contain anything more than such casual allusions as those we have just cited. Two of them are in _The Black Book_, and one would seem to bring us into touch, though but remotely, with the historical “Arthur the warrior,”--the _dux bellorum_ of Nennius, who may have held “the place of the _imperator_ himself, when Britain ceased to be part of the dominions of Rome.”[53] This latter poem is called ‘Gereint _filius_ Erbin,’[54]--a title identical with that of the prose romance which is the Welsh collateral of Chrétien de Troyes’s _Erec_,--and, although Gereint is its hero, Arthur is introduced as a war-leader of seemingly higher rank. “At Llongborth,” the bard sings,