Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/36

Rh account of the state of the language in his time, in a treatise in which he laments the decline thereof, accounting for it by no less than sixteen elaborate reasons. This treatise, Antiquities Cornu-Britannick, was abridged by Thomas Tonkin, the Cornish historian, and the abridgment was printed in 1777, and again by Davies Gilbert at the end of his history. A copy of the full form of it in Tonkin's beautiful handwriting, a much more elaborate work, is in Add. MS. 33,420 in the British Museum. According to this, the inhabitants of the western promontories of Meneage and Penwith were in the habit of speaking the language, so much so that the parson of Landewednack, Mr. Francis Robinson, used to preach in Cornish down to the year 1678, that being the only tongue well understood by his parishioners. Scawen mentions the MSS. of the aforesaid "Anguin," as he spells him, and laments their destruction. He also speaks of a "Matins" (possibly a Primer, or Hours of our Lady) in Cornish, which had belonged to "Mr. Maynard."

In Bishop Gibson's edition of Camden's Britannia, published in 1695, there is a short account of the Cornish Language, and the Lord's Prayer and Creed, the same versions as those given by Scawen, are given as specimens. According to Gibson the language was confined to two or three western parishes, and was likely to last a very little longer. He mentions the Poem of the Passion, the Ordinalia and the Creation as the only books existing in the language.

The next authority is that excellent Celtic scholar, Dr. Edward Lhuyd, who published his Arcæologia Britannica in the year 1707. He gives the following list of the parishes in which the language was spoken:— St. Just, Paul, Buryan, Sennen, St. Levan, Morva,