Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/45

26 The writing was very faint, indeed the MS. had passed through other and by no means incompetent hands without this precious endorsement being noticed, and the finder might have missed it too had he not been deliberately looking for possible Cornish words on the backs of a number of charters relating to St. Stephenin-Brannel, after he had finished the necessary revision of the cataloguing of these documents. The date of the document is 1340, but the Cornish writing on the back is somewhat later, perhaps about 1400. The language and spelling agree with those of the Poem of the Passion and the Ordinalia, and the exact, metre is not found anywhere else. The speaker (it may be a part in some play) offers a lady to some other person as a wife, praises her virtues, and then gives the lady some rather amusing advice as to her behaviour to her future husband, and how to acquire the position attributed in Cornish folklore to the influence of the Well of St. Keyne and St. Michael's Chair. A copy of these verses was printed in the Athenæum in 1877, but, as the writer admits, his readings were not at all good, for the writing was. very faint. Dr. Whitley Stokes, who had the advantage of working on a photograph, which brought out many letters which were invisible in the original, published an amended version in the Revue Celtigue.

5. The Poem of Mount Calvary, or The Passion.—There are five MSS. of this in existence. One is in the British Museum (Harl. 1782), and is probably the original, said to have been found in the church of Sancreed. It is a small quarto, on rough vellum, written very badly in a mid-fifteenth-century hand, and embellished with very rude pictures. Of the other copies, two are in the Bodleian, an incomplete and much "amended" one in the Gwavas collection of Cornish writings in the British Museum, with an illiterate translation by William Hals, the Cornish historian, and one is in private hands.