Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/378

Rh Cornishman, John Keigwin of Mousehole, to whose zeal for the preservation of the language Cornish students owe so much. His translation, the autograph MS. of which now belongs to Sir John Williams of Llanstephan, though there is another copy in the Bodleian, was never printed, but it was used largely in the vocabulary of William Gwavas and Thomas Tonkin, edited and published, with additions of his own, by William Pryce in 1790.

2. The Life of St. Meriasek. This represents the Life of St. Meriasek or Meriadoc, son of a Duke of Brittany, and Bishop of Vannes in 780 or thereabouts, who was the patron saint of Camborne. Mixed up with it is the Legend of Constantine and Sylvester, from the well-known tenth century forgery, the Donation of Constantine, and another legend, taken from the Miracles of Our Lady. Of the details of this play I shall speak more fully later on. The only existing MS. was written in 1504 by one ‘Dominus Hadton,’ and is in the Peniarth Library, near Towyn, in Merionethshire. It consists of 4568 lines similar to those of the Ordinalia. The language is of a somewhat later variety, and the spelling is rather more grotesque and varied, but it is still substantially Middle Cornish. The play, or combination of plays, was edited in 1872, with a translation, by Dr. Whitley Stokes.

3. The Creation of the World with Noah’s Flood, by William Jordan of Helston, 1611. This play is very like the first part of Origo Mundi, and contains whole passages copied bodily therefrom. But it has several additions, such as the Fall of Lucifer and his Angels, and the Death of Cain, and it is of somewhat better construction from a dramatic point of view. It was evidently intended, as appears from the closing lines, to be the first of a series (probably a trilogy) similar to the Ordinalia, but the rest of the series, if it was ever written, has perished. Nothing is known of the writer, William Jordan, who may have been only the transcriber. The language, though idiomatic and substantially Middle Cornish, is much modernised, and the spelling has been