they did good service in the way of preserving words, proverbs, colloquial sentences, etc., and seem to have found great enjoyment in translating various passages of Scripture, songs, etc., into the Cornish that was current in their own day.  These being spelt more or less phonetically (as far as the writers knew how to do so), and therefore varying a good deal in orthography, are now of great value in determining the sound of the latest Cornish.

When Lhuyd was at work upon his Cornish Grammar, he received considerable assistance from Keigwin, Gwavas, and Tonkin, and a vocabulary and collection of Cornish fragments compiled by the last two under the title of Archæologia Cornu-Britannica were afterwards printed by Dr. William Pryce in 1790, with Lhuyd’s Grammar, under his own name, with the same title. [19]  This fraud, if it really deserves so harsh a name, was exposed by Prince L. L. Bonaparte, into whose hands the original MS. of some of it fell; but though it certainly was not right of Pryce to act in this manner, he

does deserve some credit for having published the vocabulary at all, and the service that he did in so doing may be the better estimated by a knowledge of the fact that it was very considerably through the medium of Pryce’s publication that Dr. Edwin Norris obtained the acquaintance with Cornish necessary to enable him to bring out his valuable edition of the early Cornish dramas.  It is strange that so much abuse has been heaped upon Pryce, while Davies Gilbert has escaped with comparative freedom, in spite of a villainously careless edition of a number of scraps of Cornish (printed at the end of his edition of the play of The Creation), gathered entirely from Tonkin’s MS., the Gwavas MS., or the Borlase MS., and inserted, with notes and all, without a word of acknowledgment, and in such a manner as to lead one to think that the translation and notes at any rate were his own doing.  Pryce certainly took the trouble to correct his proofs, and Davies Gilbert could hardly have attempted to do so.  Moreover, if Pryce’s preface be read carefully, it will be seen that he by no means claims the whole credit for himself, but gives plenty of it, though perhaps not enough, to Gwavas, Tonkin, Lhuyd, and Borlase.  The impression left by the preface is that Pryce was a more or less intelligent editor who added a little of his own, the amount of which he exaggerated.

In 1746 Captain (afterwards Admiral) the Hon. Samuel Barrington, brother of Daines Barrington the antiquary, took a sailor from Mount’s Bay, who spoke Cornish, to the opposite coast of Brittany, and found him fairly able to make himself understood.  In 1768 Daines Barrington himself writes an account of an interview with the celebrated Mrs. Dolly Pentreath, popularly, but erroneously, supposed to have been the last person who spoke the language.  He also contributed to Archæologia, in 1779, a letter received in

1776, written in Cornish and English, from William Bodenor, a fisherman of Mousehole, who according to Polwhele died in 1794.  The writer states that not more than four or five people in his town, and these old folk of eighty years of age, could speak Cornish.  But Barrington says that he received information that John Nancarrow of Market-Jew, aged only forty in 1779, could speak it.  Dolly Pentreath died in 1777; but Pryce, in the preface to his book of 1790, part of which is his own, though one knows not how much of it to believe, and Whitaker, vicar of Ruan-Lanihorne, in his Supplement to Polwhele’s History of Cornwall (1799), mention that two or three people were still living who were able to speak Cornish, though this was only hearsay evidence.

In his History of Cornwall, vol. v. (1806), the Rev. R. Polwhele speaks of one Tompson, an engineer of Truro, whom he met in 1789, the author of the well-known epitaph on Dolly Pentreath, and says that he knew more Cornish than ever Dolly Pentreath did.  But Polwhele did not think that at the time he wrote there were two persons living who could really converse in Cornish for any length of time.  Some years ago the present writer came upon a letter in the British Museum addressed to Sir Joseph Banks, and dated 1791, the author of which mentions his own father as the only living man who could speak Cornish.  Unluckily the reference to the letter has been lost, and there is so much Banks correspondence in the British Museum that it is almost impossible to find it again.  But the statement is by no means conclusive, and there were probably several other “last living men” going on at once, and certainly John Tremethack, who died in 1852 at the age of eighty-seven, must have known a good deal of Cornish, some words of which he taught to his daughter, Mrs. Kelynack of Newlyn, who was living in 1875.  There

was also George Badcock, the grandfather of Bernard Victor of Mousehole, who taught a certain amount of Cornish to his grandson, who was living in 1875, when the present writer saw him.

Then it is considered that Cornish, as a spoken language, died out.  The process was gradual, though perhaps rather rapid at the last, and, as far as is generally known, the old tongue finally disappeared in the earlier half of the nineteenth century.  Words and sentences, and even such things as the Creed and Lord’s Prayer were handed on, some of them to our own day.  The mother-in-law of the present writer, Mrs. W. J. Rawlings (née Hambly) of Hayle, who died in 1879 at the age of fifty-seven, had learnt to repeat the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in Cornish when she was a child at school at Penzance, but unluckily had quite forgotten them in later life.  In 1875 Mr. and Mrs. John Kelynack, Mrs. Soady, Mrs. Tregarthen, and Captain Stephen Richards, all of Newlyn, and Mr. Bernard Victor of Mousehole handed on to the Rev. W. S. Lach Szyrma, then vicar of Newlyn, and to the present writer the tradition of the numerals and a few words and sentences, which may be found in a paper contributed by the present writer to the Transactions of the Philological Society in 1876, and a few years later Dr. Jago received some of the same tradition.  Thus it may be said that so long as any of these three are alive, a faint flicker of living Cornish remains, even if there is no verity in the weird legends of the survival of more as an esoteric language among the peasantry and the mining and fishing folk of the West.  But even if the spoken Cornish be dead, its ghost still haunts its old dwelling, for the modern English speech of West Cornwall is full of Celtic words, and nine-tenths of the places and people from the Tamar to the Land’s End bear Cornish names.

Mr. Hobson Matthews in his History of St. Ives, Lelant, Towednack, and Zennor, has an interesting chapter on Cornish.  He gives reasons for supposing that the language survived in St. Ives, Zennor, and Towednack even longer than in Mounts Bay, and states that the families of Stevens and Trewhella were among the last to keep it up in Towednack.  He also mentions one John Davy, who was living in 1890 at Boswednack in Zennor (a hamlet between the Gurnard’s Head and Zennor Churchtown), who had some traditional knowledge of Cornish, knew the meanings of the place-names in the neighbourhood, and “could converse on a few simple topics in the ancient language.”  Unless Mr. Matthews, whose judgment one would trust in such a matter, actually heard him do so, the last statement is not easy to