Cornish and English was formerly among the MSS. of Dr. William Borlase in the possession of his descendant, Mr. W. C. Borlase.  The present writer had it in his possession for a short time in 1877 or 1878, and copied about half of it, but returned it to Mr. Borlase, who wanted it back, and it was then printed in the 1879 volume of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.  At the time of the sale of Mr. Borlase’s library, this tract, which when the present writer last saw it used to live between the pages of Dr. Borlase’s MS. Collections on Cornish, did not appear, and its present ownership is unknown.  It is in the handwriting of the Rev. Henry Usticke, Vicar of Breage (died 1769), and in the Gwavas MS. in the British Museum there are several pieces in the same hand.  As a copy of Boson’s original it is rather inaccurate, but Boson wrote by no means a clear hand.  It is of great interest as the composition of one who, though he was brought up to speak English, as he himself says, had acquired a thorough knowledge of Cornish as it was spoken in his day, without having even looked at any of the literary remains of the language.  He was also a man of general education, and in this tract and in his letters is rather fond of airing his Latin.  Very little is known of him except that he was the son of Nicholas Boson and was born at Newlyn in 1655 and died some time between 1720, the date of his last letter to Gwavas, and 1741, the date of the death of the latter, who is recorded to have received a copy of verses in Cornish found among Boson’s papers after his death.  The date of the Nebbaz Gerriau is

unknown, but it mentions a little book called The Duchess of Cornwall’s Progress, which the author says that he wrote “some years past” for his children, refers (though not by name) to John Keigwin, who died in 1710, as being still alive, and does not mention Lhuyd’s Grammar, published in 1707, so that we may infer that the date is somewhere about 1700.  The Duchess of Cornwall’s Progress, which had at least thirty pages (for he refers to the thirtieth page), was probably in English, with a few passages in Cornish, which Dr. Borlase, who had seen two copies of it, transcribed into his Cornish Collections.  Judging from his letters and from this tract, John Boson was a man of considerable intelligence, and one about whom one would like to know more, and his Cornish writings are of more value than those of the somewhat pedantic Keigwin.