Llewarch Hen, or Llewarch the aged, was a prince of Cumberland. Driven from his domain by the Saxons, he sought a refuge at the place which is now called Shrewsbury, and subsequently on the shore of the lake of Bala, a beautiful sheet of water in Merionethshire, overlooked on the south by the great mountain Arran. There he died at the age of one hundred and fifty years. His poems consist chiefly of elegies on his sons, twenty-four in number, all of whom perished in battle, and on his slaughtered friends. They are composed in triplets, and abound with simplicity and pathos. Myrddin Wyllt, or Myrddin the Wild, was a Briton of the Scottish border. Having killed the son of his sister, he was so stung with remorse that he determined to renounce the society of men, and accordingly retired to a forest in Scotland, called Celydon, where he was frequently seized with howling madness. Owing to his sylvan life and his attacks of lunacy, he was called Merddyn Wyllt, or the Wild. He composed poetry in his lucid intervals. Six of his pieces have been preserved: they are chiefly on historical subjects. The most remarkable of them is an address to his pig, in which he tells the woes and disasters which are to happen to Britain: it consists of twenty-five stanzas or sections. In all of them a kind of alliteration is observable, and in each, with one or two exceptions, the first line rhymes with all the rest. Each commences with ‘Oian a phorchellan’—listen, little porker! The commencement of one of these stanzas might be used in these lowering days by many a grey-headed yeoman to his best friend:— ‘Oian a phorchellan: mawr eryssi A fydd ym Mhrydan, ac nim dorbi. Listen, little porker! mighty wonders Shall occur in Britain, which shall not con me.’ Many and great poets flourished in the times of the Welsh princes: the three greatest were Meilyr, Gwalchmai, and Dafydd Benfras. Meilyr was bard of Gruffudd ap Cynan, prince of Gwynedd or North Wales, who died in 1137. He sang the praises of his master, who was a celebrated warrior and a bountiful patron of the muse, in whose time and under whose sanction those forms of composition, generally called the twenty four measures, were invented and promulgated. Gwalchmai lived in the time of Owain, prince of Gwynedd, about whom he sang a piece which is to a certain extent known to the English public by a paraphrase made by Gray, which bears the title of ‘The Triumphs of Owain.’ Dafydd Benfras was domestic bard of Llywelyn ap Jorwerth, also prince of Gwynedd and titular king of Wales, who flourished during the first half of the thirteenth century. In one of his odes addressed to his patron, there is an animated description of a battle won by Llywelyn over King John: