Tudalen:Gwaith Goronwy Owen Cyf II.djvu/111

void of all taste, and at a time when the tunes of the ancient metres were no more known than those of the odes of Horace are now. What a wretched, low, grovelling thing that Gorchest y beirdd is, I leave you to judge. And I would, at the same time, have an impartial answer, whether the old despised, exterminated, and, I had almost said, persecuted Englyn milwr, has not something in it of antique majesty in its composition. Now, for goodness' sake, when I have a mind to write good sense in such a metre as Gorchest y beirdd, and so begin, and the language itself does not afford words that will come in to finish with sense and cynghanedd too, what must I do? Why, to keep cynghanedd I must talk nonsense to the end of the metre; as my predecessors in poetry were used to do to their immortal shame, and cramp and fetter good sense, while the Dictionary is all overturned and tormented to find out words of like ending, sense or nonsense. And besides, suppose our language were more short, comprehensive, and significant than it is— which we have neither reason nor room to wish— what abundance of mysterious sense is such a horrid, jingling metre of such a length able to contain? an Iliad in a nutshell, as they say. In short, as I understand that it and its fellows were introduced by the authority of an Eisteddfod, I wish we had an Eisteddfod again to give them a dimittimus to some peaceable acrostic land, to sport and converse with the spirits of deceased puns, quibbles, and conundrums of pious memory. Then should I gladly see the true primitive metres reinstated in their ancient dignity, and sense re-