id much to keep the spirit of literature alive;
while the nonconformist ministers of Wales have always been vigorously
and eminently devoted to the same cause.

Under happier conditions to-day, the latest expression of this vital
persistence of the Welsh in the quest of spiritual ideals is the
movement that has carried the new national university to completion,
and rallied the younger generation under the banner of "Cymru Fydd"
(Young Wales). The songs of Ceiriog Hughes, the poems of Islwyn, the
works of scholars like Professor John Rhys, Canon Silvain Evans, and
Mr. Gwenogfvyn Evans; the ardent writing and editing of Mr. Owen M.
Edwards in his innumerable magazines and other adventures; and the
novels of Daniel Owen,--these may be named as among the influences
that count most to the Wales of the nineteenth century's end.

NOTE.--For citations from Welsh literature see articles
on Aneurin, Mabinogion, and Taliesin. The Breton branch
of Celtic literature will be treated under the heading
'Villemarque,' the celebrated collector of 'Barzaz-Breiz.'

IV--CORNISH

The literature of a single county of England is not likely to be very
extensive, and when that literature and its language died for good and
all, a century ago, it becomes still more limited. Until the reign of
Henry VIII., though for some time English had been very generally
spoken throughout the county, the old Celtic Cornish, holding a middle
position, philologically as well as geographically, between Welsh and
Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peasantry as far east
as the Tamar. The great ecclesiastical revolution of that period
helped to destroy it. Neither prayer-book nor Bible was translated
into it; and though the ardently Catholic Cornish at first would have
none of the former, saying that it was "but like a Christmas game,"
they were overruled by the forcible argument of "apostolick blows and
knocks," and had to submit. Then the language receded rapidly. By the
time of the Great Rebellion Truro was its eastern limit; early in the
eighteenth century only the two western claw-like promontories
retained it; and though Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, was not
really the last person who spoke it, it was dead before the present
century was born. A few traditional sentences, the numerals up to
twenty, and some stray words lingered on until our own day,--twenty
years ago the present writer took down a fair collection