Tudalen:Drych y Prif Oesoedd 1902.djvu/31

during the nineteenth, and are recorded in another part of this Introduction. Generations of Welsh people read and re-read the Drych, thoroughly believing the correctness of the story. Nor is this to be wondered at. He knew the secrets of popular success. He always gives his "authorities" with scrupulous care, though these are often not more tangible than an "MS. Vet.," which does duty for the author when other sources fail him. These quotations from other and older writers were very reassuring to the popular mind, and served to set at rest any doubts the more critical might otherwise be inclined to entertain. Moreover, he gives us details. He deals in no vague generalities: he quotes even the words of the chief actors in this great national drama. In 1715, Daniel Defoe had published his first part of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and had immediate proof how scrupulous attention to the details of an event is one of the chief conditions of verisimilitude. Theophilus Evans may have heard of this wonderful new book, which was the topic of conversation wherever Englishmen met; he may have read it and perceived this fact. But it is not necessary to suppose this. He may have arrived along independent lines at the same conclusion as Defoe, and, at any rate, his mastery of this art was not a whit inferior to that of the Englishman. I must not fail to mention also, as contributing to the same end, his occasional critical treatment of his authorities. He sometimes rejects as fiction some old myths of Cymric history, and though this is often accompanied in adjoining paragraphs by instances of equally remarkable credulity, this occasionally critical attitude sufficed to make the author appear to