Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/50

Rh and the author has borrowed whole passages from it; but as a whole Jordan's play possesses greater literary merit, and there are many additions to the story in it, and. much amplification of the ideas and dialogue. Occasionally sentences of several lines in English are introduced, and it is curious to note that whenever this is the case, they are given to Lucifer or one of his angels, and in such a manner as to seem as if the author meant to imply that English was the natural language, of such beings, and that they only spoke Cornish when on their good behaviour, relapsing into their own tongue whenever they became more than ordinarily excited or vicious. Five complete copies of this play are known, two of which are in the Bodleian, one in the British Museum (Harl. MS. 1867), and two are in private hands (one bound up with the MS. of The Passion already mentioned). Besides these there is a fragment in a similar hand to that of the complete Museum copy (certainly not that of John Keigwin, who translated the play in 1693 at the request of Sir Jonathan Trelawny, then Bishop of Exeter, though it has his translation on the opposite pages to the text) in the Gwavas collection in the British Museum. In a list of books published in Welsh (as it is expressed), given in one of Bagford's collections for a History of Printing (Lansdowne MS. 808, in the British Museum), mention is made of this play. No date is given, but. the names of the books are arranged chronologically, and this comes between one of 1642 and one of 1662. The play has been printed (with Keigwin's translation) by Davies Gilbert in 1827, and with a translation by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Philological Society's volume for 1864. Of William Jordan, the writer, nothing is known whatever. He may have been merely the transcriber, and it is possible that the transcription may be connected