The tin found in the lodes and streams of the Devonian Slates of West Cornwall was the only large source of supply to the world down to Henry Martyn's time. The granite porphyries which form the Land's End had come to be worked only a century before that for the 'bunches' of copper which fill the lines of fault and fissure. It was chiefly from the deeper lodes of Gwennap, near Truro, that his family had drawn a competence. The statement of Richard Carew, in his _Survey of Cornwall_, was true of the dim centuries before Herodotus wrote, that the 'tynne of the little angle (Cornwall) overfloweth England, watereth Christendom, and is derived to a great part of the world besides'.[1] Tyrian and Jew, Greek and Roman, as navigators, travellers, and capitalists, had in the darkness of prehistoric days dealings with the land described in an Elizabethan treatise on Geography as a foreign country on that side of England next to Spain. London itself is modern compared with the Cornish trade, which in its latest stage assumed the Latin name _Stannum_, and the almost perfect economic laws administered by the Lord Warden of the Stannaries since King John leased the mines to the Jews, and Edward I., as Earl of Cornwall, established the now vexed 'royalties' by charter. Even in the century since Henry Martyn's early days, fourteen of the Cornish mines have yielded a gross return of more than thirteen millions sterling, of which above one-fifth was clear profit. Whether the Romans used the Britons in the mines as slaves or not, the just and democratic system of working them--which was probably due to the Norman kings, and extorted the admiration of M. Jars, a French traveller of the generation to which Henry Martyn's father belonged--did not humanise the population. So rude were their manners that their heath-covered rocks bore the name of 'West Barbary.' Writing two centuries before Martyn, Norden described the city of his birth as remarkable for its neatness, which it still is, but he added, there is not a town 'more discommendable for the pride of the people.' The Cornish miner's life is still as short as it is hard and daring, in spite of his splendid physique and the remarkable health of the women and children. But the perils of a rock-bound coast, the pursuits of wrecking and smuggling, added to the dangers of the mines, and all isolated from the growing civilisation of England, had combined, century after century, to make Cornwall a byword till John Wesley and George Whitfield visited it. Then the miner became so changed, not less really because rapidly, that the feature of the whole people which first and most continuously strikes a stranger is their grave and yet hearty politeness. Thomas Carlyle has, in his _Life of Sterling_, pictured the moral heroism which Methodism, with its 'faith of assurance,' developes in the ignorant Cornish miner, a faith which, as illustrated by William