Page:The Cornwall coast.djvu/186

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180
THE CORNWALL COAST

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." The stone above her grave was erected in 1860 by "the Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, in union with the Rev. John Garrett, Vicar of St. Paul." Prince Lucien, nephew of the first Napoleon, was an eager student of philology. In 1854 George Borrow, then touring Cornwall (his father was a Cornishman), visited Paul Church, and noticed a Cornish epitaph on the walls — said to be the only inscription in the old vernacular surviving in this fashion. It may be given as a specimen of the extinct language:—

"Bounas heb dueth Eu poes Karens wei
tha Pobl Bohodzhak Paull han Egles nel";

which has been thus rendered:—

"Eternal life be his whose loving care
Gave Paul an almshouse and the church repair."

Two words here prove how Cornish was affected by the Roman occupation — pobl for people, and egles for church.

When Paul was burned Mousehole suffered also, and its only house that survived was the manor of the Keigwins, now the "Keigwin Arms," whose appearance quite justifies the antiquity claimed for it. Borrow, when he came here, must have