196 THE LAND'S END 



advanced psychological stage. But although these 

 childish things have been put away so long, you will 

 still find faint traces of them everywhere, even in 

 the most Saxon districts in England. They inspire 

 little or no belief, but are kept in memory, like old 

 ballads, and passed on from generation to generation. 

 In Cornwall belief in them continued to within very 

 recent times, and they are remembered still. It was 

 said not very long ago by a well-known Penzance 

 writer that folklorists, when they come to Cornwall, 

 especially the west, complain that the materials are so 

 abundant they do not know how to manage them. 

 Merely to enumerate and classify legends and beliefs 

 in giants, little men, and fairies of a dozen denomi- 

 nations, ghosts, souls, semi-devils and phantoms of 

 divers sorts, goblins, monsters and mermaids, is more 

 than they can do. A very large number of these 

 legends, enough, one would imagine, to satisfy the 

 greatest enthusiast, have been collected by Robert 

 Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England^ 

 and by William Bottrell in Stones and Folklore of West 

 Cornwall^ in three series. There we have it, or as 

 much of it as we want, a huge crude mass, the rough 

 material out of which an early literature might have 

 come had there ever been a mind capable of assimilat- 

 ing and giving it literary form. 



When the old language was in a moribund state 

 during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, 

 there appeared to be but one man in the county to 

 lament its passing William Scawen, who loved the 

 old things, old usages and traditions, and who rebuked 



