which a fragment exists. What it was
called or what it was about no one knows, but an actor in it, setting
about to learn his own part in it, wrote that short piece of
thirty-six lines on the back of a title-deed of some land in the
parish of St. Stephen, near Bodmin. The deed drifted eventually into
the British Museum, and the present writer discovered the Cornish
verses on it, not wholly by accident, about nineteen years ago. The
writing belongs to the latter part of the fourteenth century, and is
therefore the earliest literary fragment of the language.

6. The rest of the literature of the Cornish language consists of a
few songs, epigrams, mottoes, proverbs, and the like, a short
dissertation on the language, and the tale of 'John of Chy-an-Hur,' a
widely known folk-tale. These are mostly in the latest form of
Cornish, and are contained in the MS. collection of William Gwavas in
the British Museum and in that of Dr. Borlase, until lately in the
possession of his descendants. Most of them have been printed by
Davies Gilbert (with the play of the 'Creation'), by William Pryce in
the 'Archaeologia Cornu-Britannica' in 1790, by Mr. W. C. Borlase in
the Transactions of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and in a
fragmentary way in a few other places. They are mostly translations or
adaptations from the English, but a few, such as the rather doggerel
'Pilchard Fishing Song,' are originals. Lastly, in the Church of St.
Paul, near Penzance, there is the one solitary epitaph in the
language; written while it was still just alive, and perhaps the last
composition in it.

[The versions given of these specimens of Cornish literature
are founded on those of Dr. Whitley Stokes and Dr. E. Norris.
The phraseology has been to some extent altered, but the
renderings are almost all the same.]

FROM THE 'POEM OF THE PASSION'

[The Death of Our Lord on the Cross]

His pain was strong and sharp, so that he could not live,
But must yield up his white soul; ever purely had he lived.
And Christ prayed, as thus in many a place we read,
"My soul I do commend, O Lord, between thy hands!"

For weakly he breathed, being constrained, so that he could not rest;
On nothing could he lean his head for the garland that he wore.
If he leaned to one side, for his shoulder it grieved him
And the tree did yet worse, if he set it backwards.

Nor could he lean forward for fear of being choked.
Then was i