DAFYDD AB GWILYM.
[At William Morris, Rhag. 18, 1753
I AM under no manner of concern about my works. It is equal to me whether they are printed or continue as I have written them for eighty or a hundred years longer. Let them. take their chance, and shift for themselves, and share the common fate of all sublunary things. If I have not a better immortality than they can procure me, I had even as good have none. Yet they, amongst others, may help to preserve our language to posterity; and so far, and no further, a wise man and a lover of his country ought to regard them.
Y mae'n resynol (chwedl chwithau) weled mor ddigydwybod y mae poblach yn llurguniaw ac yn sychmurniaw gwaith yr hen Ddafydd ap Gwilym druan.
I wish people were once so far in their right minds as to think they could not mend Dafydd ap Gwilym's works; then they would certainly never mar them. Dafydd ap Gwilym, it is true, had his foibles, as well as other mortals. He was extravagantly fond of filching an English word. now and then, and inserting them in his works, which makes me wonder what should induce the judicious Dr. Davies to pitch upon him as the standard of pure Welsh. Whereas he, of all others of that age, seems least deserving of the honour. I know that that babbler, Theophilus Evans, author of Drych y Prif Oesoedd, pretends to say that "Davy" understood never a word of English; but the way he goes about to prove his barefaced assertion, is a sufficient confutation of
