Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/40

Rh 1776, written in Cornish and English, from William Bodenor, a fisherman of Mousehole, who according to Polwhele died in 1794. The writer states that not more than four or five people in his town, and these old folk of eighty years of age, could speak Cornish. But Barrington says that he received information that John Nancarrow of Market-Jew, aged only forty in 1779, could speak it. Dolly Pentreath died in 1777; but Pryce, in the preface to his book of 1790, part of which is his own, though one knows not how much of it to believe, and Whitaker, vicar of Ruan-Lanihorne, in his Supplement to Polwhele's History of Cornwall (1799), mention that two or three people were still living who were able to speak Cornish, though this was only hearsay evidence.

In his History of Cornwall, vol. v. (1806), the Rev. R. Polwhele speaks of one Tompson, an engineer of Truro, whom he met in 1789, the author of the well-known epitaph on Dolly Pentreath, and says that he knew more Cornish than ever Dolly Pentreath did. But Polwhele did not think that at the time he wrote there were two persons living who could really converse in Cornish for any length of time. Some years ago the present writer came upon a letter in the British Museum addressed to Sir Joseph Banks, and dated 1791, the author of which mentions his own father as the only living man who ctmld speak Cornish. Unluckily the reference to the letter has been lost, and there is so much Banks correspondence in the British Museum that it is almost impossible to find it again. But the statement is by no means conclusive, and there were probably several other "last living men" going on at once, and certainly John Tremethack, who died in 1852 at the age of eighty-seven, must have known a good deal of Cornish, some words of which he taught to his daughter, Mrs. Kelynack of Newlyn, who was living in 1875. There