Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/34

14 by the Cornish, as vulgar history says, and as Dr. Borlase avers ; but, as the case shows itself plainlj^ to be, forced upon the Cornish by the tyranny of England, at a time when the English language was yet unknown in Cornwall. This act of tyranny was at once gross barbarity to the Cornish people, and a death-blow to the Cornish language." Mr. Whitaker alludes to the first use of the English liturgy in Menheniot church, and says, "that had the liturgy been translated into Cornish as it was in Welsh, the Cornish language would have been preserved to the present moment." Had there ever been any translation of the scriptures into Cornish, it wodld surely have been noticed by so learned an antiquarian. If what Borlase asserts be true, then the Cornish people themselves are to be blamed for having used very potent means for the destruction of their own original lano;ua2:e. Although Whitaker asserts that the English language was "forced" upon the Cornish by the tyranny of England, yet, Borlase is just as positive to the contrary. In Borlase's Natural History of Cornwall, at page 315, it is said that "when the liturgy at the reformation was appointed by authority to take place of the mass, the Cornish desired (Seawen p. 49) that it should be in the English language, being apprehensive that it might be injoined them in their mother tongue, as it was with regard to the Welsh. By this means and the gentry mixing gradually with the English, the Cornish language lost ground in proportion as it lay nearer to Devon." When two such writers differ in this manner, it may