These mystery-plays, as we may learn from a passage in Carew’s “Survey of Cornwall” (p. 71), were still performed in Cornish in his time, _i.e._ at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He says:— “Pastimes to delight the minde, the Cornish men have Guary miracles and three mens songs; and, for the exercise of the body, hunting, hawking, shooting, wrastling, hurling, and such other games. “The Guary miracle—in English, a miracle-play—is a kind of enterlude, compiled in Cornish out of some Scripture history, with that grossenes which accompanied the Romanes _vetus Comedia_. For representing it, they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of his enclosed playne some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to heare and see it, for they have therein devils and devices, to delight as well the eye as the eare; the players conne not their parts without booke, but are prompted by one called the Ordinary, who followeth at their back with the booke in his hand, and telleth them softly what they must pronounce aloud. Which manner once gave occasion to a pleasant conceyted gentleman, of practising a mery pranke; 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.