The literature of a single county of England is not likely to be very extensive, and when that literature and its language died for good and all, a century ago, it becomes still more limited. Until the reign of Henry VIII., though for some time English had been very generally spoken throughout the county, the old Celtic Cornish, holding a middle position, philologically as well as geographically, between Welsh and Breton, was the mother tongue of at any rate the peasantry as far east as the Tamar. The great ecclesiastical revolution of that period helped to destroy it. Neither prayer-book nor Bible was translated into it; and though the ardently Catholic Cornish at first would have none of the former, saying that it was "but like a Christmas game," they were overruled by the forcible argument of "apostolick blows and knocks," and had to submit. Then the language receded rapidly. By the time of the Great Rebellion Truro was its eastern limit; early in the eighteenth century only the two western claw-like promontories retained it; and though Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1778, was not really the last person who spoke it, it was dead before the present century was born. A few traditional sentences, the numerals up to twenty, and some stray words lingered on until our own day,--twenty years ago the present writer took down a fair collection from the mouths of ancient mariners in Mount's Bay,--and a few words are still mixed with the local dialect of English. But as a language Cornish is dead, though its ghost still haunts its old dwelling in the names of villages, houses, woods, valleys, wells, and rocks, from Tamar to Penwith. As may be expected, a great proportion of the literature is in verse, and most of that is in dramatic form. So little is there that an exhaustive list of what survives is quite possible. It is as follows:-- 1. _The Poem of the Passion._ A versified account of the Passion of our Lord, recounting the events from Palm Sunday to Easter, with the addition of many legendary incidents from the Gospel of Nicodemus and other similar sources. The earliest MS. (in the British Museum) is of the fifteenth century, which is probably the date of its composition. It has been twice printed, once by Davies Gilbert, with a translation by John Keigwin in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1862.