; for he undertaking (perhaps of set
purpose) an actor's roome, was accordingly lessoned (beforehand)
by the Ordinary, that he must say after him. His turn came. Quoth
the Ordinary, Goe forth man and shew thy selfe. The gentleman
steps out upon the stage, and like a bad Clarke in Scripture
matters, cleaving more to the letter than the sense, pronounced
those words aloud. Oh! (sayes the fellowe softly in his eare) you
marre all the play. And with this his passion the actor makes the
audience in like sort acquainted. Hereon the prompter falls to
flat rayling and cursing in the bitterest termes he could devise:
which the gentleman, with a set gesture and countenance, still
soberly related, untill the Ordinary, driven at last into a madde
rage, was faine to give all over. Which trousse, though it brake
off the enterlude, yet defrauded not the beholders, but dismissed
them with a great deale more sport and laughter than such Guaries
could have afforded."(51)

Scawen, at the end of the seventeenth century, speaks of these
miracle-plays, and considers the suppression of the _Guirrimears_,(52) or
Great Plays or Speeches,(53) as one of the chief causes of the decay of
the Cornish language.

"These _Guirrimears_," he says, "which were used at the great
conventions of the people, at which they had famous interludes
celebrated with great preparations, and not without shows of
devotion in them, solemnized in great and spacious downs of great
capacity, encompassed about with earthen banks, and some in part
stone-work, of largeness to contain thousands, the shapes of which
remain in many places at this day, though the use of them long
since gone.... This was a great means to keep in use the tongue
with delight and admiration. They had recitations in them,
poetical and divine, one of which I may suppose this small relique
of antiquity to be, in which the passion of our Saviour, and his
resurrection, is described."

If to these mystery-plays and poems we add some versions of the Lord's
Prayer, the Commandments, and the Creed, a protestation of the bishops in
Britain to Augustine the monk, the Pope's legate, in the year 600 after
Christ (MS. Gough, 4), the first chapter of Genesis, and some songs,
proverbs, riddles, a tale and a glossary, we have an almost complete
catalogue of what a Cornish library would be at the presen