mercy, that his father might live.  The angel let him look into Paradise, where he saw many strange and beautiful foreshadowings of things that should be upon the earth; and the angel gave him three seeds from the Tree of Life, and he departed.  When he came to where his father was, he found that he was already dead, and he laid the three seeds in his mouth, and buried him therewith on Mount Moriah; and in process of time the three seeds grew into three small trees, and Abraham took of the wood thereof for the sacrifice of Isaac his son; and afterwards Moses’ rod, wherewith he smote the rock, was made from one of their branches.  And soon the three trees grew together into one tree, whereby was symbolised the mystery of the Trinity; and under its branches sat King David when Nathan the Prophet came to him, and there he bewailed his sin, and made the Miserere Psalm.  And Solomon, when he would build the Temple on Mount Sion, cut down the tree, which was then as one of the chiefest of the cedars of Lebanon, and bid men make a beam thereof; but it would in no wise fit into its place, howsoever much they cut it to its shape.  Therefore Solomon was wroth, and bid them cast it over the brook Cedron as a bridge, so that all might tread upon it that went that way.  But after a while he buried it, and over where it lay there came the Pool Bethesda with its healing powers; and when our Lord came on earth the beam floated up to the surface of the pool, and the Jews found it, and made thereof the Cross whereon Christ died on Calvary.

The metres of these plays are various arrangements of seven and four-syllabled lines, of which more anon in the chapter on prosody.  There are three MSS. of this Trilogy in existence, 1. The Oxford MS. of the fifteenth

century, from which the others were copied, and from which Dr. Edwin Norris edited the plays in 1859.  2. Another Oxford MS., presented to the Bodleian by Edwin Ley of Bosahan about 1859, with a translation by John Keigwin.  The copy of the text is older by a century than the translation.  3. A copy in the library of Sir John Williams, Bart., of Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire, with an autograph translation by Keigwin.  This was Lhuyd’s copy.

7.  The Life of St. Meriasek.—This play, the MS. of which was written by “Dominus Hadton” in the year 1504, as appears by the colophon, was discovered by Dr. Whitley Stokes some thirty-two years ago among the MSS. of the Peniarth Library, near Towyn in Merioneth.  It represents the life and death of Meriasek, called in Breton Meriadec, the son of a Duke of Brittany, and interwoven with it is the legend of St. Sylvester the Pope and the Emperor Constantine, quite regardless of the circumstance that St. Sylvester lived in the fourth century, and St. Meriasek in the seventh.  The play contains several references to Camborne, of which St. Meriasek was patron, and to the Well of St. Meriasek there.  It is probable that it was written for performance at that town.  The language of the play is later than that of the Ordinalia, the admixture of English being greater, while a few of the literal changes, such as the more frequent substitution of g (soft) for s, and in one instance (bednath for bennath) the change of nn to dn, begin to appear.  The grammar has not changed much, but the use of the compound and impersonal forms is more frequent, and the verb menny has begun to be more commonly used as a simple future auxiliary.  The metres are much the same as those of the Ordinalia.  The spelling is rather more grotesque and varied.  But, since this play (or combination of plays) is to a large extent on

local Cornish and Breton, rather than on conventional Scriptural lines, it has an interest, full of mad anachronisms as it is, which is not to be found in the Biblical plays.  Some passages are of considerable literary merit, and a good deal of early Cornish and Breton history is jumbled up in it, and yet remains to be worked out, for Dr. Whitley Stokes’s excellent edition of 1872 does not go very much into historical side questions.  It is unlucky that this play was not discovered until after the publication of Canon Williams’s Lexicon, but his own interleaved copy of the Lexicon, with words and quotations from St. Meriasek, is in the possession of Mr. Quaritch of Piccadilly, and Dr. Stokes has published forty pages of new words and forms from the same play in Archiv für Celtische Lexicographie.

8.  The Cornish conversations in Andrew Borde’s Booke of the Introduction of Knowledge, printed in 1542.—These consist of the numerals and twenty-four sentences useful to travellers.  They were evidently taken down by ear, and appear in a corrupted form.  Restored texts, agreeing in almost every detail, were published by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Revue Celtique, vol. iv., and by Prof. Loth in the Archiv fur Celtische Lexicographie in 1898.

9.  In Carew’s Survey of Cornwall, 1602, are the numerals up to twenty, with a hundred, a thousand, and what is meant for ten thousand, but is really something else.  There are also ten words compared with Greek, a dozen phrases, some more words, and the Cornish equivalents of twelve common Christian names.

10.  The Creation of the World, with Noah’s Flood, by William Jordan of Helston, a.d. 1611.  The construction of this play is very like that of the first act of the Origo Mundi (the metres are substantially the same),

and the author has borrowed whole passages from it; but as a whole Jordan’s play possesses greater literary merit, and there are many additions to the story in it, and much amplification of the ideas and dialogue.  Occasionally sentences of several lines in English are introduced, and it is curious to note that whenever this is the case, they are given to Lucifer or one of his angels, and in such a manner as to seem as if the author meant to imply that English was the natural language of such beings, and that they only spoke Cornish when on their good behaviour, relapsing into their own tongue whenever they became more than ordinarily excited or vicious.  Five complete copies of this play are known, two of which are in the Bodleian, one in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 1867), and two are in private hands (one bound up with the MS. of The Passion already mentioned).  Besides these there is a fragment in a similar hand to that of the complete Museum copy (certainly not that of John Keigwin, who translated the play in 1693 at the request of Sir Jonathan Trelawny, then Bishop of Exeter, though it has his translation on the opposite pages to the text) in the Gwavas collection in the British Museum.  In a list of books published in Welsh (as it is expressed), given in one of Bagford’s collections for a History of Printing (Lansdowne MS. 808, in the British Museum), mention is made of this play.  No date is given, but the names of the books are arranged chronologically, and this comes between one of 1642 and one of 1662.  The play has been printed (with Keigwin’s translation) by Davies Gilbert in 1827, and with a translation by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Philological Society’s volume for 1864.  Of William Jordan, the writer, nothing is known whatever.  He may have been merely the transcriber, and it is possible that the transcription may be connected

with that revival of Cornish patriotism which seems to have happened in the early seventeenth century.

11.  Nebbaz Gerriau dro tho Carnoack (A few words about Cornish), by John Boson of Newlyn.  The only known MS. of this little tract in