Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/34

Rh though husband and wife, parents and children, master and servauntes, doe mutually communicate in their native language, yet there is none of them but in manner is able to converse with a stranger in the English tongue, unless it be some obscure persons that seldom converse with the better sort."

In 1630 Sir John Dodridge in his History of the Ancient and Modern estate of the Principality of Wales, Duchy of Cornwall, and Earldom of Chester, says: "The people inhabiting the same [i.e. Cornwall] are call'd Cornishmen, and are also reputed a remanent of the Britaines . . . they have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France."

In 1632, Dr. John Davies, the well-known Welsh lexicographer, published a Welsh translation of the Booke of Christian Exercise of Robert Parsons the Jesuit, under the title of Llyfr y Resolusion. In it he gives a Cornish version of the Lord's Prayer and Creed, the earliest extant, and evidently translated from Latin, not from English.

In the same year appeared a play called The Northern Lass, by Richard Brome. In this occurs an opprobrious sentence of Cornish, put into the mouth of a Cornishman bearing the absurd name of "Nonsence," and addressed to a Spaniard who had no English, on the argument that Cornwall being the nearest point of Britain to Spain, Cornish might possibly approach nearer to Spanish than English did.

The next mention of Cornish we find in a diary of the Civil War, written by Richard Symonds, one of the Royalist army, in Cornwall in 1644 (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 17,052). He gives a short vocabulary of common words, together with four short sentences. To these he appends the following note :—