nagement of the borough, was a zealous Presbyterian. The living of St. Ives with Lelant, had been designed for some young man of the town, who indiscreetly, and probably in joke, declared that when he succeeded to the church he would preach furiously against Presbyterians, and teach that Hell itself was strewed over with their bones. This was said in a garden, in defiance of the Cornish proverb, Nynges gun heb lagas, na kei heb scover. "There is no downs without eyes, nor hedge or wall without ears." And Mr. Stephens walking in a garden adjoining overheard this declaration, and in consequence exerted his influence with the patron to obtain the living from the Bishop of Exeter for one who might prove less unfavourably disposed towards his sect, the only one at that time considered as formidably hostile to the Established Church; and to ensure this object Mr. Symonds was selected, because his father, who exercised the trade of a barber at Cambridge, discharged also the office of clerk to a Presbyterian meeting-house.
Mr. Symonds was received as a friend at St. Ives, and elected into the Corporation. But in the course of a few years a violent struggle arose respecting the election of a Recorder, when Mr. Symonds most prudently considering that nothing further was likely to be obtained from those who had already given him a living, sold himself to the opposite party, carried the election for them by his casting vote, and received the living of St. Earth. See various Essays in the London Magazine, with the signature Y.Z. for 1767, pp. 225, 456, 464, 628; for 1768, pp. 25, 199, 575; for 1769, pp. 18, 235, 578.
Mr. Symonds died in 1775, and was succeeded by Mr. George Rhodes, of Devonshire, some time a Fellow of Exeter College. This gentleman having obtained preferment near his immediate connections, resigned the living in 1781, and was succeeded by Mr. Mayow, of Bray near Looe, who never resided, and died in the year 1800, when the benefice was given to Mr. Samuel Gurney, recently deceased (1833) and to whose memory a marble slab has been
