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A Life of St. David. By Professor J. E. Lloyd, M.A., D.Lttt. ^l'^HE Society for Promoting Christian Know- ledge, now well advanced in its third I century of usefulness, has many fine achievements to its credit, but it has probably never rendered truer service to the Christian cause than in the texts, translations and handbooks which it is at present issuing for the elucidation of early Christian literature. Nothing can be better than that the inquirer of to-day should be furnished with the means of knowing what the early Christian writers actually thought and felt, and that, to achieve this end, the whole armoury of modern historical criticism should be brought into use. Welshmen will be glad that the life of a Welsh saint, the 'Dewi Sant' who is so great a figure in Welsh medieval legend and is still annually commemorated wherever Welshmen foregather, has been included in the Society's "Translations of Christian Literature. It is, with the possible exception of the Life of St. Cadoc, the earliest life of a Welsh ecclesiastic from the pen of a Welshman which we possess, and it has a double interest; it preserves for us as much of the memory of St. David and his work as we have a right to expect after the lapse of five stormy centuries, and it gives us the very air and aroma of his episcopal seat of Menevia in the declining days of the independence of the Welsh Church. Its author is no shadowy, conjectural figure; Rhygyfarch (or it may be that Rhigyfarch would be a more accurate modern rendering) belongs to a well known family, the year of his birth and that of his death are on record, and a Latin poem of his, which inveighs against the evils of foreign dominion, illustrates for us his attitude towards the oncoming tide of Norman conquest. Like St. Augustine in a similar cataclysm, he has no hope for the world as he sees it, and looks for- ward to a city that has foundations "Liberty and freedom are gone; let us now seek the eternal country, where the fadeless flowers bloom for ever." The care of this volume has been entrusted to the experienced hands of the Rev. A. W. Wade- Evans, who has for many years devoted himself to the study of the period to which it relates. As far back as 1913, he published in the Cymmrodor (vol. xxiv. 4-28) a revised text of the life, founded on a careful collation of the (extremely faulty) text of W. J. Rees (Llandovery, 1853), with the original MS. (Vespasian A xiv.) in the British Museum, and to this he added a new translation, which was as much needed as the re- formed text, for the renderings of the Llandovery edition were often ludicrously wrong. He has now reissued this translation in a revised form, with extracts from the lives of other saints which throw light on that of St. David and with a very full apparatus of notes. Though the scholar must still refer to the original Latin, it is a real boon to have in this convenient form a trust- worthy English translation and therewith ample discussion of the various problems, historical, topographical and philological, which are raised by the narrative of Rhigyfarch. It is hardly necessary to say that the editor writes out of a great store of learning appro- priate to his task. He is familiar with the work of others who have trodden this field before him, and makes the fullest use of it; neverthe- less, he has on many points his own views, which he maintains with much confidence. Those who are familiar with his previous work will remember that he rejects the earlier chapters of Gildas, and assigns to them a much later origin than the rest of the treatise; on that issue the present volume shows him to be still unconvinced. In general, it may be said that his disposition is to argue as though the history of sixth century Wales were known to us in much greater detail than is actually the case. Some sceptics have been bold enough to doubt the very existence of St. David this is unreason- able, but Mr. Wade-Evans himself tells us, in his excellent introduction, that the earliest mention of the saint is in an Irish document drawn up about A.D. 730," and, since there is no earlier extant life than that of Rhigyfarch, written about 1080 or 1090, it becomes clear that, in attempting to fill in the details of his life, we have nothing to rely upon but the St. David's tradition. Rhigyfarch speaks, indeed, of certain moth-eaten manuscripts, written in an antique style, of which he had made use in the compilation of his work. But we do not know their age and authority, nor yet the extent to which he used them. What is beyond doubt is that in his day the neighbourhood of Mynyw was full of objects of veneration, and that each had its appropriate story, handed down from generation to generation in honour of the great patron saint and for the benefit of successive streams of pilgrims. The atmosphere in which Rhigyfarch wrote was that of legend, not that of history. Indeed, it may be said that the most valuable contribution made by Mr. Wade-Evans to the study of the subject is the careful review of the ground which his full and accurate local know- ledge enables him to make. He discusses the various sites referred to in the life with acumen and skill, being much aided by his familiarity with the spoken Welsh of the district. And the service he has thus rendered is the more valuable in that the bleak promontory of Pebidiog is not among the more accessible parts of Wales. He who to-day undertakes the pilgrimage to St. David's will reap a rich reward, but it is not a visit to be undertaken as a mere incident in the traveller's day. Life of St. David. By A. W. Wade-Evans (S P.C.K. Translations of Christian Literature), London, 1923. 7s ed.