from the
mouths of ancient mariners in Mount's Bay,--and a few words are still
mixed with the local dialect of English. But as a language Cornish is
dead, though its ghost still haunts its old dwelling in the names of
villages, houses, woods, valleys, wells, and rocks, from Tamar to
Penwith.

As may be expected, a great proportion of the literature is in verse,
and most of that is in dramatic form. So little is there that an
exhaustive list of what survives is quite possible. It is as
follows:--

1. _The Poem of the Passion._ A versified account of the Passion of
our Lord, recounting the events from Palm Sunday to Easter, with the
addition of many legendary incidents from the Gospel of Nicodemus and
other similar sources. The earliest MS. (in the British Museum) is of
the fifteenth century, which is probably the date of its composition.
It has been twice printed, once by Davies Gilbert, with a translation
by John Keigwin in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1862.

2. _The Ordinalia._ Three connected dramas, known collectively under
this title. The first recounts the Creation and the history of the
world as far as Noah's Flood. The second act of this gives the story
of Moses and of David and the Building of Solomon's Temple, ending
with the curiously incongruous episode of the martyrdom of St.
Maximilla, _as a Christian_, by the bishop placed in charge of the
Temple of Solomon. The second play represents the life of our Lord
from the Temptation to the Crucifixion, and this goes on without a
break into the third play, which gives the story of the Resurrection
and Ascension, and the legend of the death of Pilate. The connecting
link between the three is the legend of the wood of the cross. This
well-known story, most of which is interwoven with the whole trilogy,
is as follows:--Seth was sent by his dying father to beg the promised
Oil of Mercy to save him; the angel who guarded Paradise gave him
three seeds, or, according to the play, apple-pips; and when he
returned and found his father already dead, he placed them in Adam's
mouth and buried him on Mount Moriah. In process of time the three
seeds grew into three trees, and from them Abraham gathered the wood
for the sacrifice of Isaac, and Moses got his rod wherewith he smote
the sea and the rock. Later the three trees, to symbolize the Trinity,
grew into one tree, and David sat under it to bewail his sin. But
Solomon cut it down to make a beam for the Temple, and s