FOOTNOTES:
[187] ‘Liber Landavensis,’ 301.
[188] Ibid., 347.
[189] ‘Mabinogion,’ 461.
[190] ‘Literature of the Kymry,’ 25.
[191] Mr. Conway, in his erudite chapter on the Basilisk, appears to think that the red colour of the Welsh dragon, in the legend of Merlin and Vortigern, determines its moral character; that it illustrates the evil principle in the struggle between right and wrong, or light and darkness, as black does in the Persian legends of fighting serpents.—‘Demonology and Devil-Lore,’ p. 369. (London, Chatto and Windus, 1879.)
[192] Spenser, ‘Faerie Queene.’
[193] ‘Mabinogion,’ 484.
VIII.
For the prototype of the dragon-haunted caves and treasure-hills of Wales, we must look to the lightning caverns of old Aryan fable, into which no man might gaze and live, and which were in fact the attempted explanation of thunderstorms, when the clouds appeared torn asunder by the lightning.