The representatives of the Scandinavian Scalds in Cambrian poetry gave way to a Troubadour. Davydd ab Gwilym has sometimes been called .the Welsh Ovid, and sometimes the Welsh Petrarch, but is said by his English translator to "approach-more nearly to Burns than to anyother poet, whether of his own or other countries." His poems are of a character almost entirely new in the literature of Wales; the subjects of them are chiefly themes of love and social festivity, instead of valour and heroism. The exact dates of Davydd's birth and death are unknown, but he is supposed to have been born about 1340, and to have died about 1400, the year of the death of our Chaucer. The incidents of his life, which have been related at some length by Owen Jones and Owen Pughe, are chiefly connected with his success in lore and in satire. On one occasion he eloped with a married woman who had been his paramour ; but tho fugitives were overtaken and separated, and Davydd was condemned to pay a heavy fine, from which the men of Glamorgan, who had elected him their chief bard, and who looked more to his genius than his morality, re leased him by discharging it. In satire his powers were so tremendous that when Ithys Meigan, another bard, incensed him by a poem reflecting on the illegitimacy of his birth, he replied in another of such pungency that Rhys, on hearing it recited, fell down and expired. Later in life another contest of satire with Gruffydd Gryg, an ancient bard of Anglesea, was brought to a more agreeable close by a good-natured stratagem of Bola Bauol, a mutual friend. He contrived that a report of the death of each should reach the ears of the other; and, as he expected, on receipt of the sad intelligence animosity was forgotten. Davydd composed a panegyrical elegy on Gruffydd, and Gruffydd one on Davydd; and when the trick was discovered the friendship was renewed with more warmth than ever. The chief object of his satire was, how ever, the " Little Hunchback," Bwa Bach, the husband of the 3Iorrydd, to whom a hundred and forty of the love-poems of Ab Gwilym are addressed. The religious orders of the time are also taken to task by a poet whose right to criticise them is not very clearly made out. 'Cowards the close of his life, Davydd ab Owilym, surviving his friends, became of a melancholy and religious turn, and some verses composed on his death-bed are said to breathe a strain of genuine piety.
The poems of Davydd ab Gwilym were first published in Welsh only, with an English biographical notice, by Owen Jones and Owen Pughe, in 1789. An English translation of several of the best, by Mr. Arthur Johnes, under the assumed name of Maclog, appeared in 1834. Mr. Borrow gives us to understand in his Lavengro ' that he has com pleted a translation of tho works of Ab Owilym with hates, critical, historical, and explanatory, but nothing of this version has been made public. Mr. Borrow is a warm admirer of the Welsh poet. " I hare no hesitation in saying," he observes, " that he makes one of the some half-dozen really great poets whose verses, in whatever language they write, exist et the present day and are more or less known." Contemporary with Davydd ab Gwilym during the whole course of his career, and flourishing long before and after it, was Iola Goeh, the friend and domestic bard of Owain Glyndwr, or Owen Glendower, who wrote verses on the death of Tudyr ab Gronw in 1315, and on the comet of 1402, and who died about 1420, at the age, it is supposed, of nearly a century and a quarter. If the dates be correct, he must have been about 1I8 at the time that he spoke of Owain, who died at 67, as "old." One of his most interesting pieces, composed two years before the insurrection of Glyndwr, is a description of Gsvain's house at Sycharth, which the poet somewhat hyperbolically compares to West inhuster Abbey, and which ho describe' its master aa • keeping almost literally an "open house," there being neither bolts, bars, nor door keeper. Iola Goch wrote several poems to inflame his countrymen in
their rising, and lamented the death of ()wain in a patriotic elegy.
Some uncertainty seems to prevail as to the date of Sion Cent, or John of Kent, a poet and religious writer, who is stated by Owen l'ughe to have lived between 1410 and 1470, and by Williams to have flourished from 1380 to 1410. The latter date is probably the correct one, if Sion Cent was, as he appears to have been, a Lollard. His name was derived not from the county of Kent, but from Kentchurch, or Kentehester, in Herefordshire, where he resided. Ilia poems, which are of interest in an historical point of view, as illustrating, like our l'iers Plowman, the dawn of the Reformation, aro the subject of a series of articles In the Cambrian Journal' for 1860. Ilis name is still current in popular tradition as that of a conjuror, probably owing to his having been n heretic.
The last of our list of bards of the second period of Welsh poetry is Lewis Glyn Coast who flourished during the wars of the Roses, which terminated in the accession of a Tudor to the English throne. Ile was the bard to Jasper, earl of Pembroke, son of Owen Tudor and the widow of Henry V., and fought with his patron at the battle of 31ortimer's Cross in 1461. His works are of less poetical than histo rical value, throwing a considerable light on the history of Wales during his period. They were firstpublished, in the original Welsh, with English notes, chiefly of explanatory historical matter, by the tnrodorion, or Royal Cambrian Institution, in tho year 1837, under the editorship of the Rev. John Jones, of Christchurch, known by the name of Tegid.
Tho bards we have mentioned are but a small proportion of those who flourished, and some of whose compositions have been preserved. 31r. Stephens, in his' Literature of the Kymry during the Twelfth and Two Succeeding Centuries,' mentions six-and-twenty poets whose names we have not enumerated, between 1350 and 1400; and at or subsequent to the year 1400, during the revolt of Glyndwr and the wars of the Roses, the bards amounted, ho states, to "several hundreds." It is stated by Owen Pughe, in the Arch.vologia ' (vol. xiv., p. 216), that the principal heads under which ancient Welsh literature may be classed are—poetry, bardic institutes, laws, history, theology, ethics, proverbs, dramatic tales, and grammars ; and that " the first of these classes, poetry, is by far the most extensive, for it may be computed to fill about eight parts out of the ten of our old writings, omitting to take into account the heraldic collections altogether ; but with respect to the quantity that is printed, such a proportion may be reversed." " On this subject," he adds, " I have made a calculation so as to enable me to infer that I have perused upwards of 13,000 poetical pieces of various denominations for the purpose of collecting words in the course of about eighteen years that I have been compiling the dictionary of tho Welsh Language." Towards the conclusion of the second period of Welsh literature some alterations of consequence took place in the laws of metrical composition. Certain changes appear to have been proposed and adopted at a congress of bards held in 1350, under the presidency of Ivor Hael, or Ivor the Generous, the constant patron and friend of Davydd ab Gwilym ; but it was a hundred and one years later, in 1451, that at the Eisteddvod of Caermarthen, held under the influence of Gruffydd ab Nicolas, a powerful nobleman, a system was adopted which prevailed for nearly four hundred succeeding years. Davydd ab Edmanad, a bard now of no great note, who was president of the Eis teddvod, succeeded in obtaining the assent of his colleagues to four-and twenty new canons of poetry, which he had compiled with the assist ance of other bards of North Wales, and though the men of Glamorgan protested against the decision, their protest seems to have had but little effect.