e late Mr. William Copeland Borlase's _Age of the Saints_
--a monograph on Early Christianity in Cornwall: but, in a way, no more
hopeless book was ever penned. The author confessed it, indeed, on his
last page. "There seems to be little ground for hope that we shall be
ever able to gain a perfectly true insight into the history of the epoch
with which we have attempted to deal, or to unravel the meshes of so
tangled a web." He felt his task, as he put it, to be not unlike that of
gathering up the broken pieces of pottery from some ancient tomb, with the
hope of fitting them together so as to make one large and perfect vase,
but finding during the process that they belong to several vessels, not
one of which is capable of restoration as a whole, though some faint
notion of the pristine shape of each may be gained from the general
pattern and contour of its shards. All that can be gained from the
materials at hand is a reasonable probability that Cornwall, before it
bent its neck to the See of Canterbury, had been invaded by three distinct
streams of missionary effort--from Ireland, from Wales, and from Brittany.
But even in what order they came no man can say for certain.

The young lady in my friend's story wished to hear the service of the
Church of England in 'the fine old Cornish language.' Alas! if Edward VI.
and his advisers had been as wise, the religious history of Cornwall,
during two centuries at least, had been a happier one. It was liberal to
give Englishmen a Liturgy in their own tongue; but it was neither liberal
nor conspicuously intelligent to impose the same upon the Cornishmen, who
neither knew nor cared about the English language. It may be easy to lay
too much stress upon this grievance; since Cornishmen of this period had a
knack of being 'agin the government, anyway,' and had contrived two
considerable rebellions less than sixty years before, one because they did
not see their way to subscribing 2,500 pounds towards fighting King James
IV. of Scotland for protecting Perkin Warbeck, and the other under
Perkin's own leadership. But it was at least a serious grievance; and the
trouble began in the first year of Edward VI.'s reign. The King began by
issuing several Injunctions about religion; and among them, this one:
That all images found in churches, for divine worship or otherwise, should
be pulled down and cast forth out of those churches; and that all
preachers should persuade the people fr