Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/54

Rh William Borlase, Rector of Ludgvan, formerly in the possession of his descendant, the late W. C. Borlase, F.S.A., M.P., but now belonging to Mr. J. D. Enys, of Enys; in Pryce's Archæologia Cornu-Britannica, 1790, and in Davies -Gilbert's editions of the Poem of the Passion and Jordan's play of The Creation, published respectively in 1826 and 1827. Those in the Borlase MS. (except a few from a work of John Boson), and those printed by Pryce and Davies Gilbert, were probably taken from the Gwavas MS. and from Tonkin's MSS. There is also one epitaph dated 1709 in Paul Church, an epitaph on Dolly Pentreath, which does not appear ever to have been inscribed on her tomb, and the letter of William Bodenor in 1776.

These fragments may be classified as follows:—

Songs and Poems.

1. Lhuyd's Elegy on William of Orange, 1702. Sixty-three lines of verse in rhyming triplets, in modern Cornish, with occasional archaic turns. A copy occurs in the Gwavas MS.; it was printed by Pryce, with a Latin version, as part of a correspondence between Lhuyd and Tonkin, and by Polwhele in his fifth volume, with the same correspondence. There is a copy with an English version by John Keigwin in the library of Sir John Williams, Bart, of Llanstephan.

2. A song beginning "Ma leeas gwreage, lacka vel zeage" a series of moral platitudes on married life and the bringing up of children, by James Jenkins of Alverton, near Penzance (died 1710). This, consists of five stanzas of five or six lines each. There is a complete copy in the Gwavas MS., and a copy wanting one line in the Borlase MS., and this incomplete version, with a translation, has been printed by Pryce and Davies Gilbert. A note in Pryce says that Tonkin had it from Lhuyd and