It would hardly be rash to rest the question of the Celtic origin, in any but the most remote and partial sense, of the Arthurian Romances on the _Mabinogion_[50] alone. The posteriority of these as we have them need not be too much dwelt upon. We need not even lay great stress on what I believe to be a fact not likely to be disputed by good critics, that the reading of the French and the Welsh-English versions one after the other, no matter in what order they be taken, will leave something more than an impression that the French is the direct original of the Welsh, and that the Welsh, in anything at all like its present form, could not by any possibility be the original of the French. The test to which I refer is this. Let any one read, with as open a mind as he can procure, the three Welsh-French or French-Welsh romances of _Yvain-Owain_, _Erec-Geraint_, and _Percivale-Peredur_, and then turn to those that are certainly and purely Celtic, _Kilhwch and Olwen_, the _Dream of Rhiabwy_ (both of these Arthurian after a fashion, though quite apart from our Arthurian Legend), and the fourfold _Mabinogi_, which tells the adventures of Rhiannon and those of Math ap Matholwy. I cannot conceive this being done by any one without his feeling that he has passed from one world into another entirely different,--that the two classes of story simply _cannot_ by any possibility be, in any more than the remotest suggestion, the work of the same people, or have been produced under the same literary covenant. [Footnote 50: Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, 2d ed., London, 1877.] [Sidenote: _The Legend itself._]