Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/50

 30 entirely ignorant of the Cornish language, and had no acquaintance whatever with the Welsh. The discovery of the original manuscript, now in the possession of Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, shews the work to have been compiled in 1730, by Tonkin or Gwavas, and disingenously published by Pryce as his own. These printed works relate to late Cornish, but more important documents existed, which would furnish examples of the language, when spoken in a state of purity, and which it was desirable should be properly elucidated. The earliest is a vocabulary of Latin words with Cornish explanations, preserved in the Cottonian Library, in the British Museum, and there entitled ^Vocabularium Wallicum,' (Bibl. Cot. Vespas. A. 14). This was first noticed by Lhuyd in the Cornish Preface to the Archse- ologia, (p. 222,) and proved by him to be not Welsh but Cornish. It has been printed in the same order as it is written, and elucidated by Zeuss, in his Grammatica Celtica (2 vols. 8vo., Leipsic, 1853.) It has since been printed alphabeti- cally by Mr. Norris in his * Cornish Drama,' with additional illustrations from the cognate dialects. This vocabulary is of great philological importance. The manu- script was written in the thirteenth century, and may have been a copy of an older original, even of the ninth century, as it closely agrees with the Welsh of that age, and it contains important proofs that the Welsh then more closely approximated to the Cornish than in later ages. The next important document is a poem, entitled Mount Calvary; a manuscript of the fifteenth century; it contains