claims to be the last place where a sermon was preached in the Cornish
tongue, in 1678; as was natural, the old language lingered longest in
isolated districts of the Lizard and Land's End. It may be guessed
that some of his younger hearers would not have understood the
preacher, for the language had already greatly decayed. It was never a
particularly rich dialect of the Celtic, and left no remains worthy to
perpetuate its existence. Norden, who wrote in the middle of the
sixteenth century, stated that "of late the Cornishe men have much
conformed themselves to the use of the English tongue, and their
English is equal to the best, especially in the eastern parts. In the
weste parts of the countrye, in the hundreds of Penwith and Kirrier,
the Cornishe tongue is most in use amongste the inhabitants." A little
later, a loyal Cornishman bewailed "our Cornish tongue has been so
long on the wane that we can hardly hope to see it increase again;
for, as English first confined it within this narrow country, so it
still presses on, leaving it no place but about the cliffs and sea, it
being now almost only spoken from the Land's End to the Mount, and
again from the Lizard towards Helston and Falmouth." The inevitable
happened, just as somewhat the same process has taken place in Wales,
in Ireland, and in the Scottish Highlands. In these three countries
the old tongue had the aid of a powerful literature. Welsh and Erse
may be very long in dying out, as we hope they will be; yet nothing
can prevent the people of Wales and Ireland becoming bi-lingual, and
this can only have one ultimate result. Commercially, a single
language is necessary to the nation, and there has never been any
doubt as to which that language must be. And some of those who cling
to their vernacular as a proof of their Celticism may be making a
great mistake; speech is never a proof of race, and survivals of other
blood than Celtic adopted dialects of the Celtic speech.

CHAPTER VII

THE LIZARD TO HELSTON

Mr. Norway says that it would be hard to find an uglier spot than
Lizard Town, but of course he fully admits the grandeur of the coast
of which it is the small metropolis. The name, which first applied
only to the most southern headland, was not given from any fanciful
resemblance to a Lizard, but appears to be a corruption of the Cornish
words _Lis-arth_, _lis_ being the secular enclosure, the palace or
court, as distinct from _lan_ the sacred en