[Footnote 2: It occurs in the same chapter as the story of La Perrette, which has been traced, after Benfey, by Prof. M. Müller in his "Migration of Fables." (_Sel. Essays_, i., 500-74); exactly the same history applies to Gellert.]
_Remarks._--We have still to connect the legend with Llewelyn and with Bedd Gelert. But first it may be desirable to point out why it is necessary to assume that the legend is a legend and not a fact. The saving of an infant's life by a dog, and the mistaken slaughter of the dog, are not such an improbable combination as to make it impossible that the same event occurred in many places. But what is impossible, in my opinion, is that such an event should have independently been used in different places as the typical instance of, and warning against, rash action. That the Gellert legend, before it was localised, was used as a moral apologue in Wales is shown by the fact that it occurs among the Fables of Cattwg, which are all of that character. It was also utilised as a proverb: "_Yr wy'n edivaru cymmaint a'r Gwr a laddodd ei Vilgi_ ("I repent as much as the man who slew his greyhound"). The fable indeed, from this point of view, seems greatly to have attracted the Welsh mind, perhaps as of especial value to a proverbially impetuous temperament. Croker (_Fairy Legends of Ireland_, vol. iii., p. 165) points out several places where the legend seems to have been localised in place-names--two places, called "Gwal y Vilast" ("Greyhound's Couch"), in Carmathen and Glamorganshire; "Llech y Asp" ("Dog's Stone"), in Cardigan, and another place named in Welsh "Spring of the Greyhound's Stone." Mr. Baring-Gould mentions that the legend is told of an ordinary tomb-stone, with a knight and a greyhound, in Abergavenny Church; while the Fable of Cattwg is told of a man in Abergarwan. So wide-spread and well-known was the legend that it was in Richard III's time adopted as the national crest. In the Warwick Roll, at the Herald's Office, after giving separate crests for England, Scotland, and Ireland, that for Wales is given as figured in the margin, and blazoned "on a coronet in a cradle or, a greyhound argent for Walys" (see J. R. Planché, _Twelve Designs for the Costume of Shakespeare's Richard III._, 1830, frontispiece). If this Roll is authentic, the popularity of the legend is thrown back into the fifteenth century. It still remains to explain how and when this general legend of rash action was localised and specialised at Bedd Gelert: I believe I have discovered this. There certainly was a local legend about a dog named Gelert at that place; E. Jones, in the first edition of his _Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, 1784_, p. 40, gives the following _englyn_ or epigram: