f this country from the earliest records
till it expired in this parish of St. Paul. This stone is erected
by the Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, in union with the Rev. John
Garret, vicar of St. Paul, June, 1860."

It seems hardly right to deprive the old lady of her fair name; but there
are many people in Cornwall who maintain that when travellers and grandees
came to see her, she would talk anything that came into her head, while
those who listened to her were pleased to think that they had heard the
dying echoes of a primeval tongue.(44) There is a letter extant, written
in Cornish by a poor fisherman of the name of William Bodener. It is dated
July 3, 1776, that is, two years before the death of Dolly Pentreath; and
the writer says of himself in Cornish:--

"My age is threescore and five. I am a poor fisherman. I learnt
Cornish when I was a boy. I have been to sea with my father and
five other men in the boat, and have not heard one word of English
spoke in the boat for a week together. I never saw a Cornish book.
I learned Cornish going to sea with old men. There is not more
than four or five in our town can talk Cornish now,--old people
fourscore years old. Cornish is all forgot with young people."(45)

It would seem, therefore, that Cornish died with the last century, and no
one now living can boast to have heard its sound when actually spoken for
the sake of conversation. It seems to have been a melodious and yet by no
means an effeminate language, and Scawen places it in this respect above
most of the other Celtic dialects:--

"Cornish," he says, "is not to be gutturally pronounced, as the
Welsh for the most part is, nor mutteringly, as the Armorick, nor
whiningly as the Irish (which two latter qualities seem to have
been contracted from their servitude), but must be lively and
manly spoken, like other primitive tongues."

Although Cornish must now be classed with the extinct languages, it has
certainly shown a marvelous vitality. More than four hundred years of
Roman occupation, more than six hundred years of Saxon and Danish sway, a
Norman conquest, a Saxon Reformation, and civil wars, have all passed over
the land; but, like a tree that may bend before a storm but is not to be
rooted up, the language of the Celts of Cornwall has lived on in an
unbroken continuity for at least two thousand years. What does this mean?
It means that throug