[44] An extensive domain.—Compare what follows with Vergil’s description (Dryden’s trans.):
Just in the gate and in the jaws of Hell,
Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell,
And pale diseases and repining age—
Want, fear, and famine’s unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death’s half-brother, Sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep.—Æneid: VI. 273–8
[48a] Merlin.—A bard or seer who is supposed to have flourished about the middle of the fifth century, when Arthur was king. He figures largely in early tales and traditions, and many of his prophecies are to be found in later Cymric poetry, to one of which Tennyson refers in his Morte d’Arthur:
I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talks of knightly deeds
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made—
Though Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more—but let what will be, be.
[48b] Brutus, the son of Silvius.—According to the Chronicles of the Welsh Kings, Brwth (Brutus) was the son of Selys (Silvius), the son of Einion or Æneas who, tradition tells, was the first king of Prydain. In these ancient chronicles we find many tales recorded of Brutus and his renowned ancestors down to the fall of Troy and even earlier.
[48c] A huge, seething cauldron.—This was the mystical cauldron of Ceridwen which Taliesin considered to be the source of poetic inspiration. Three drops, he avers, of the seething decoction enabled him to forsee all the secrets of the future.
[48d] Upon the face of earth.—These lines occur in a poem of Taliesin where he gives an account of himself as existing in various places, and contemporary with various events in the early eras of the world’s history—an echo of the teachings of Pythagoras:
Morte carent animae; semperque priore relicta
Sede, novis habitant domibus vivuntque receptae.—Ovid: Metam. XV. 158–9.
[48e] Taliesin.—Taliesin is one of the earliest Welsh bards whose works are still extant. He lived sometime in the sixth century, and was bard of the courts of Urien and King Arthur.
[49a] Maelgwn Gwynedd.—He became lord over the whole of Wales about the year 550 and regained much territory that had once been lost to the Saxons. Indeed Geoffrey of Monmouth asserts that at one time Ireland, Scotland, the Orkneys, Norway and Denmark acknowledged his supremacy. Whatever truth there be in this assertion, it is quite certain that he built a powerful navy whereby his name became a terror to the Vikings of the North. In his reign, however, the country was ravaged by a more direful enemy—the Yellow Plague; “whoever witnessed it, became doomed to certain death. Maelgwn himself, through Taliesin’s curse, saw the Vad Velen through the keyhole in Rhos church and died in consequence.” (Iolo MSS.)