Welsh Journals

the country-its greenness in "Green Magic," its autumn gold, hanging, as one remembers, till nearly Christmas, in "Golden Wales," and most vividly of all its blue in "June Sapphire." "Rhiannon's birds are singing, sweeter than nightingales, Blue are the hills as sapphires-the crowded hills of Wales. So thick the lawns with hyacinths, one knows not if the blue Be lakes of water, lakes of flowers, or lakes of morning dew; So paved the woods with hyacinths, the brook that glimmers by Has every wave beglamoured to the colour of the sky." Miss Winstanley has seen the passing of the twenty years chronicled in this number of the "Welsh Outlook" over Aberystwyth and its college, and many of her poems tell of the tragedy of 1914-18­of the Welsh Fusiliers quartered there who "fought the hated Cheshires all up Great Darkgate Street," of "Students going to War," of Principal T. F. Roberts: "Scholar and saint and man with heart of gold, As the fine Celtic race were wont to be." Of "The Welsh Village in the Snow;" "I asked of her son. Cold wind stirred And rattled the latch of the door. "On the iSomme with the rest" she answered "The rest of the village." No more." And with moving simplicity of "The Welsh in Palestine" "Ploughmen and shepherds from the sweet Welsh soil, How blest must be your sleep in Galilee How fair the visions that in dreams ye see Where Coeur de Lion failed for all his toil, St. Louis turned and wept, he could not win, The ploughmen and the shepherds entered in." Few Christmas gifts from one "old Aberite" to another could more surely bring back the magic past than this little volume in praise of "this strange and elfin land A.D. THE NEW MONARCHY AND THE CELTIC FRINGE Ðy "David JWathev SheedandWard. 1933. 18s. In popular tradition the Age of Elizabeth is a glorious, roaring comedy. Father David Mathew, in his careful and erudite study of "The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe," reminds us that it was also an age of tragedy. The sub-title — "A Study of Celtic and Spanish Influences on Elizabethan History "-indicates his theme a little more closely, but nothing short of the spaciousness of a seventeenth century book-title could have done it full justice. It is the double tragedy of two losing causes that he unfolds Celtic civilization on tne one hand, the spiritual unity of Europe on the other. Each was threatened by the encroachments of the New Monarchy, with its prescription of a single ex- clusive faith and culture ttor each distinctive sovereign state--a diversity of unities in place ci the unity in diversity of mediaeval civilization. Why did these two survivals of a dying world, each of them hostile to the tendencies of the age, fail to make common cause against them? 'Ihe book suggests a twofold answer lost leaders at home, uncomprehending allies abroad. The natural leaders of the Celtic communities were precisely those whose social position and geogra- phical contacts laid them most open to the sceptical influences of the Renaissance and the insidious allurements of a settled society such as Tudor England was so rapidly becoming. Com- panion pictures of the time-serving Welsh squires of the Irish road-Bulkeleys, Wynns, Salusburys -in Chapter III, of the polished and cynical Maitland of Lethington in Chapter VI, of the aloof yet susceptible Earl of Desmond in Chapter IX, all help to point the author's moral "it is not the attacks of enemies so much as the indifference of friends that has caused the destruction of apparently well-founded systems." Abroad the one hope of the disinherited lay in Spain, "that great, once friendly power which now represented the spiritual unity that formed their only bond." But if Spain was the champion of the Counter-Reformation, with almost com- plete ascendancy at Rome since the Council of Trent, she was also a home of the New Monarchy, and her own record with racial minorities offered little hope of sympathy or understanding towards the "threatened civiliza- tion of the Celtic fringe." To these incompati- bilities Father Mathew attributes the failure of the devoted band of Welsh Catholic exiles to secure the despatch to Wales of an adequate, trained priesthood, which in turn he regards as a prime cause of the downfall of Catholicism there -"a surrender forced by encirclement and slow starvation"; and a similar lack of mutual com- prehension wrecked successive schemes in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands for resisting Elizabethan Protestantism by Spanish aid. It is a dramatic story, finding its denouement in the wild attempt of the Earl of Essex, as the Queen's reign neared its stormy close, to rally round himself and use for his own advancement all the discontented elements-racial, feudal, religious-that were dreaming of a new -tease of