Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/53

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
34
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

English version, in Pryce's Archæologia Cornu-Britannica in 1790, and by Davies Gilbert at the end of his edition of Jordan's Creation, 1827, in Cornish and English. The English versions of Borlase, Pryce, and Davies Gilbert are substantially the same, and are probably Tonkin's. An English version, translated from Lhuyd's Welsh, but pretended to be from Cornish, was printed in Blackwood's Magazine in 1818, and again in an abridged and expurgated form in Mr. J. Jacob's collection of Celtic Fairy Tales in 1891. There is a much amplified version of the story in English in William Botterell's Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, published at Penzance in 1870, and a short and rather foolish one in Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England, 1865, 1871, 1881. The language is a good specimen of the latest Cornish. The same story is given as an Irish folk-tale in an early volume of Chambers's Journal.

13. The Preface to the Cornish Grammar in Lhuyd's Archæologia Britannica. This consists of two and a quarter folio pages of close print, and is written in the Cornish of his own day. It is the work of a foreigner, but is nevertheless very well done. A not very good translation, probably the work of Tonkin and Gwavas, is given by Pryce, and reprinted by Polwhele in the fifth volume of his History.

14. The rest of the remains of Cornish consist of a few songs, verses, proverbs, epigrams, epitaphs, maxims, letters, conversations, mottoes, and translations of chapters and passages of Scripture, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, King Charles's Letter, etc. They are found in the Gwavas MS. (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 28,554), a collection made by William Gwavas, barrister-at-law, and ranging in date from 1709 to 1736; in the Borlase MS. of the date of about 1750, in the handwriting of Dr.