And to these eleven, in her third volume published in 1849, Lady Charlotte Guest added the Hanes Taliessin, compiled in the fourteenth century, but, according to Ernest Renan, belonging to the more ancient of the two classes above mentioned. The great beauty, originality, and antique flavour of these stories may here be exhibited by means of a few characteristic extracts. And the first to be given is from the legend of Taliessin. “In times past (it begins) there lived in Penllyn a man of gentle lineage, named Tegid Voel, and his dwelling was in the midst of the lake Tegid, and his wife was called Caridwen. And there was born to him of his wife a son named Morvran at Tegid, and also a daughter named Creirwy, the fairest maiden in the world was she; and they had a brother, the most ill-favoured man in the world, Avagddu. Now Caridwen his mother thought that he was not likely to be admitted among men of noble birth by reason of his ugliness, unless he had some exalted merits or knowledge. For it was in the beginning of Arthur’s time and of the Round Table. “So she resolved, according to the arts of the books of Fferyllt, to boil a cauldron of Inspiration and Science for her son, that his reception might be honourable, because of his knowledge of the mysteries of the future state of the world. “Then she began to boil the cauldron, which, from the beginning of its boiling, might not cease to boil for a year and a day, until three blessed drops were obtained of the Grace of Inspiration. “And she put Gwion Bach, the son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion in Powys, to stir the cauldron, and a blind man named Morda to kindle the fire beneath it, and she charged them that they should not suffer it to cease boiling for the space of a year and a day. And she herself, according to the books of the astronomers, and in planetary hours, gathered every day of all charm-bearing herbs. And one day towards the end of the year, as Caridwen was culling plants and making incantations, it chanced that three drops of the charmed liquor flew out of the cauldron and fell upon the finger of Gwion Bach. And by reason of their great heat he put his finger to his mouth, and the instant he put these marvel-working drops into his mouth he foresaw everything that was to come, and perceived that his chief care must be to guard against the wiles of Caridwen, for vast was her skill. “And in very great fear he fled towards his own land, and the cauldron burst in two, because all the liquor within it, except the three charm-bearing drops, was poisonous, so that the horses of Gwyddno Garanhir were poisoned by the water of the stream into which the liquor of the cauldron ran, and the confluence of that stream was called the Poison of the Horses of Gwyddno from that time forth.