“Sing, birds o’ the land, in merry strain, You died not far from your own Bretayne.” Besides these narrative ballads, Brittany produced at various periods idyllic songs and religious canticles. As for Cornwall, whose dialect is now extinct, she never produced much of a Celtic literature. What there is still extant is preserved in MSS. of the fifteenth century, representing possibly all the ancient literature she ever had, and dates from that or the preceding fourteenth century. These pieces consist of one poem, entitled “Mount Calvary,” and three dramas, or miracle plays, with nothing distinctly Celtic about them save the language. With the exception of these and another drama of the seventeenth century (1611), and the Lord’s Prayer translated, the obsolete and defunct Cornish dialect has no literature to show, and therefore is not concerned in the special Celtic revivals characteristic of the literature in the other dialects. A translation of the ancient dramas from the original Cornish has been made and published thirty years ago by Edwin Norris. Their value now is almost solely linguistic. “The last survivor of those who spoke in their youth pure Cornish is said to have been Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole near Penzance, who died in 1778, aged 102. And even she would not have talked Cornish in her youth if she had not lived in one of the few parishes along the coasts of Mount’s Bay and St Ive’s Bay, and a few districts to the west of those bays, where alone at the beginning of the last century (eighteenth) the ancient dialect existed.” (Morley’s _English Writers_, vol. i. p. 750.) After the brilliant medieval renaissance came another period of inactivity and decline. From the sixteenth century it is true that a new series of poets and prose writers began to arrive in the different Celtic nationalities. In Ireland, during the first half of the seventeenth century, there was quite a distinguished recrudescence of national scholarship, associated with the names of Geoffrey Keating, the Four Masters, and Duald Mac Firbis, all of whom were prose writers of eminence; and in the Highlands of Scotland flourished Mary Macleod and her contemporaries. But we must come down to the period immediately following the Forty-five to encounter a more general and splendid resuscitation.