Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/49

30 local Cornish and Breton, rather than on conventional Scriptural lines, it has an interest, full of mad anachronisms as it is, which is not to be found in the Biblical plays. Some passages are of considerable literary merit, and a good deal of early Cornish and Breton history is jumbled up in it, and yet remains to be worked out, for Dr. Whitley Stokes's excellent edition of 1872 does not go very much into historical side questions. It is unlucky that this play was not discovered until after the publication of Canon Williams's Lexicon, but his own interleaved copy of the Lexicon, with words and quotations from St. Meriasek, is in the possession of Mr. Quaritch of Piccadilly, and Dr. Stokes has published forty pages of new words and forms from the same play in Archiv für Celtische Lexicographie.

8. The Cornish conversations in Andrew Borde's Booke of the Introduction of Knowledge, printed in 1542. These consist of the numerals and twenty-four sentences useful to travellers. They were evidently taken down by ear, and appear in a corrupted form. Restored texts, agreeing in almost every detail, were published by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the, Revue Celtique, vol. iv., and by Prof. Loth in the Archiv für Celtische Lexicographie in 1898.

9. In Carew's Survey of Cornwall, 1602, are the numerals up to twenty, with a hundred, a thousand, and what is meant for ten thousand, but is really something else. There are also ten words compared with Greek, a dozen phrases, some more words, and the Cornish equivalents of twelve common Christian names.

10. The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood, by William Jordan of Helston, 1611. The construction of this play is very like that of the first act of the Origo Mundi (the metres are substantially the same),