I.

The devil has often appeared in Wales in his customary form, or with his distinctive marks covered up by such clothing as mortals wear. There was even a tailor in Cardiganshire who had the honour of making a suit of clothes for his sulphuric majesty. The medieval view of this malignant spirit--which makes the devil out as dull and stupid as he is mendacious and spiteful--still lingers in some parts. Those formal pacts with the devil, the first traces of which are found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have been made in great numbers in Wales; and tales in which the devil is outwitted by a mortal are still preserved with much distinctness in various localities. That the myth of Polyphemus reappears in all accounts of this sort, is pretty well agreed among students of folk-lore. Hercules and Cacus, Polyphemus and Odysseus, Peredur and the one-eyed monster of the Mabinogion, Gambrinus and der Teufel, Jack the Giant-Killer, Norse Joetuns and Arabian genii tricked and bottled; all these are deemed outgrowths of the same primeval idea, to wit, the victory of the sun-god over the night-fiend; and the story of Sion Cent's compact with the diawl is doubtless from the same root. Certain it is that were not the devil at times gullible, he never would have been so useful as a familiar spirit, never could have been made so completely a slave to his mortal masters. The Pope (Benedict IX.) who had seven evil spirits in a sugar-bottle, merely subdivided the arch-fiend in the same way the genii of the old tales are subdivided--now existing as a dense and visible form, again expanding to blot out the sky, and again entering the narrow compass of a bottle or a nut-shell; co-existing in a million places at the same instant, yet having a single individuality.