Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/41

22 was also George Badcock, the grandfather of Bernard Victor of Mousehole, who taught a certain amount of Cornish to his grandson, who was living in 1875, when the present writer saw him.

Then it is considered that Cornish, as a spoken language, died out. The process was gradual, though perhaps rather rapid at the last, and, as far as is generally known, the old tongue finally disappeared in the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Words and sentences, and even such things as the Creed and Lord's Prayer were handed on, some of them to our own day. The mother-in-law of the present writer, Mrs. W. J. Rawlings (née Hambly) of Hayle, who died in 1879 at the age of fifty-seven, had learnt to repeat the Lord's Prayer and Creed in Cornish when she was a child at school at Penzance, but unluckily had quite forgotten them in later life. In 1875 Mr. and Mrs. John Kelynack, Mrs. Soady, Mrs. Tregarthen, and Captain Stephen Richards, all of Newlyn, and Mr. Bernard Victor of Mousehole handed on to the Rev. W. S. Lach Szyrma, then vicar of Newlyn, and to the present toriter the tradition of the numerals and a few words and sentences, which may be found in a paper contributed by the present writer to the Transactions of the Philological Society in 1876, and a few years later Dr. Jago received some of the same tradition. Thus it may be said that so long as any of these three are alive, a faint flicker of living Cornish remains, even if there is no verity in the weird legends of the survival of more as an esoteric language among the peasantry and the mining and fishing folk of the West. But even if the spoken Cornish be dead, its ghost still haunts its old dwelling, for the modern English speech of West Cornwall is full of Celtic words, arid nine-tenths of the places and people from the Tamar to the Land's End bear Cornish names.