Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/31

 11 word of English before she was past twenty years of age; as, her father being a fisherman, she was sent with fish to Penzance at twelve years old, and sold them in the Cornish language, which the inhabitants in general, even the gentry, did then well understand. She is positive however, that there is neither in Mousehole, nor in any other part of the county, any other person who knows anything of it, or at least can converse in it. She is poor, and maintained partly by the parish, and partly by fortune-telling and gabbling Cornish.' I have thus, continued Mr. Barrington, " thought it right to lay before tl^e Society (the Society of Anti- quaries) this account of the last sparks of the Cornish tongue ; and cannot but think that a linguist who under- stands Welsh, might still pick up a more complete vocabulary of the Cornish than we are yet possessed of; especially as the two neighbours of this old woman (Dolly Pentreath) whom I have had occasion to mention, are not now above seventy-seven or seventy-eight years of age, and were healthy when I saw them ; so that the whole does not depend on the life of this Cornish sybil, as she is willing to insinuate." Values Barrington. It appears, says Drew, from this letter of Daines Barrington "that in the year 1773, Dolly Pentreath was in her eighty-seventh year ; and it appears from an epitaph on her grave, that she died at the advanced age of 102; so that she must have lived fifteen years after Mr. Barrington's letter was dated and consequently must have died in 1788. " She was buried in the churchyard of the parish of