Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/37

18, Madron, Zennor, Towednack, St. Ives, Lelant, Ludgvan, and Gulval, and along the coast from the Land's End to St. Keverne (this would also include St. Hillary, Perran Uthno, Breage, Germoe, Mullion, Gunwalloe, Ruan Major and Minor, Landewednack, Grade, and St. Keverne), adding that many of the inhabitants of these parishes, especially the gentry, do not understand it, "there being no need, as every Cornishman speaks English." There is a letter of Lhuyd's to Henry Rowlands, author of Mona Antigua Restaurata (1723), printed at the end of that work, in which similar information, dated 1701, is given. Lhuyd in this letter relates his adventures in Brittany, and remarks on the closeness of Cornish to Breton.

Then the language quickly receded, until, in 1735, there were left only a few people at Mousehole, Paul, Newlyn, St. Just, and other parishes along the coast between Penzance and the Land's End who understood it. It was about this time that Gwavas and Tonkin finished their collections on the subject, and the language they found seemed to them a most irregular jargon—a peculiarity of which was a striking uncertainty of the speakers as to where one word left off and another began.

In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a little coterie of antiquaries at Penzance and the neighbourhood, who had busied themselves much with the remains of the old language. The patriarch of these was old John Keigwin of Mousehole, the translator of the Poem of the Passion and the play of The Creation. He was born in 1641, and died in 1710, and, according to Lhuyd and Borlase, his knowledge of Cornish was "profound and complete." However, that did not prevent him from making some extraordinary mistakes in his translations, which should perhaps be set down to the archaic form of the language with which he had