And then there is the national air, the last stage in the growth of that which began with some village bard's arrangement of his deep vowels and diphthongs. Long ago the words were forgotten, or lost all connexion with the tune they gave birth to; because at a certain stage the harpers took the tune up, and sang whatever words to it they might make up for the occasion. Such a tune as _All through the Night_, for example, would set out with such and such a bard on his wanderings. He would come to a wedding, and play it there, singing extempore verses to it filled full of joy and merriment. Then he would come to a house where there might be one newly dead; and his tune would again be called for; now it would be a dirge laden with mystical wailing and the joy that hides behind wailing. At the village fair it would appear as a dance; in the house of the warward chieftain it would ring and clamor with all the pomp and surging and uplift of the old wild, Quixotic, ridiculous wars. There would be different songs for it on each occasion; one hardly troubled much with the preservation of them, for song was a thing that a gentleman could call upon himself for at any time. Why keep the songs you sang today, when tomorrow you would surely sing other songs as good? Poetry was of all things the cheapest and most general where every other man, as you might say, was a poet. One hears this kind of thing at the present day. Very few of the Welsh national tunes have any traditional words to them. If there is any special song attached to this tune or that, it will probably be the work of Ceiriog, who may be called the Robert Burns of Wales, or of some individual bard in the last two or three centuries, who sang such and such words to the tune on such an occasion, or in whose tragic or amusing history those words and that tune blended were pivotal, and have passed into a popular tradition. Generally speaking, the words sung to all these airs are what are called _Pennillion_--_hen bennillion_, old verses; a kind of traditional folk-poetry arising no one knows from whom, and commemorating popular wisdom, historical events, personal peculiarities and eccentricities of long dead countryside celebrities, the beauties and delights of this or that locality, and so on. There will be war-songs, love-songs, dance-songs, dirges and nature-songs; a pennill on the three best dancers of Wales, and a pennill on the three prized things of three neighboring villages: the yews of Bettws, the bridge at Llandeilo, the sacred well at Llandybie. Unnumbered are these pennillion; perhaps more many than the tunes themselves to which they may be sung. II