The closing years of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth, saw a wonderful literary efflorescence in Wales. {240} The _Cymru_ and the _Geninen_ set and maintained a high standard of accuracy, learning, and art. Owen M. Edwards edited cheap reprints of all the Welsh classics; and himself wrote travel books, whose graceful style, delightful humour, and frequent passages of moving eloquence, entitle them to rank with the _Reisebilder_ of Heinrich Heine. The beautiful, but not always idiomatic, prose of the Welsh Bible, had become much more ornate, stiff, and difficult in the hands of Ellis Wynne, whose _Bardd Cwsc_ is, nevertheless, the finest work of creative genius in the Welsh language. Goronwy Owen, and Dr. Lewis Edwards, employed a much more flexible style; but it was not until the rise of Owen Edwards that the full possibilities of Welsh prose, as a vehicle for expressing modern ideas, became manifest. Welsh poetry there had always been an abundance of; starting with the obscure bards of the sixth century, and the Arthurian legends, passing through the warlike minstrels of the Middle Ages, to the sweet, but shallow, love poems of Davydd ap Gwilym. Then came a long period of monotonous and mediocre versifying; until real poetry again began to be produced by Goronwy Owen. A touch of sublimity in an occasional poem of Ishryn, {241} and the true lyric flavour of much of Ceiriog, place these two men in the front rank of Welsh poets. The older poetry is couched in intricate and artificial metres, the twenty-four varieties of which every bard was expected to show an acquaintance with. But of late there has been a tendency to discard these, and to write more freely and naturally. There are some genuine poets in Wales to-day; but their home seems to be the college lecture-room and not the old home of the bards, the Eisteddfod.