Let The Shade Of Pythagoras Say Whether The Poet Who Embodied In Immortal Verse The Oldest, The Most Wonderful, And At The Same Time The Most Humane, Of All Philosophy Was A Mere Amatory Poet.

Let the shade of blind Homer be called up to say whether the bard who composed the tremendous line -

"Surgit ad hos clypei dominus septemplicis Ajax" -

equal to any save ONE of his own, was a mere amatory songster. Yet, diversified as the genius of the Roman was, there is no species of poetry in which he shone in which the Welshman may not be said to display equal merit. Ab Gwilym, then, has been fairly styled the Welsh Ovid. But he was something more - and here let there be no sneers about Welsh: the Welsh are equal in genius, intellect and learning to any people under the sun, and speak a language older than Greek, and which is one of the immediate parents of the Greek. He was something more than the Welsh Ovid: he was the Welsh Horace, and wrote light, agreeable, sportive pieces, equal to any things of the kind composed by Horace in his best moods. But he was something more: he was the Welsh Martial, and wrote pieces equal in pungency to those of the great Roman epigrammatist, - perhaps more than equal, for we never heard that any of Martial's epigrams killed anybody, whereas Ab Gwilym's piece of vituperation on Rhys Meigan - pity that poets should be so virulent - caused the Welshman to fall down dead.

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