COilNISH NAMES. 



49 



COENISH NAMES. 



ABSTRACT OF REV. DR. BANNISTER'S PAPER. 



CoENWALL is a peculiar county : from its geographical position, it 

 may be called ''the first and the last" in England, and ''one and 

 all" good Cornishmen will maintain that it is also "the best;" 

 and even the inhabitants of Devonshire, " the garden of England," 

 claiming, with excusable and natural partiality, this latter title 

 for their own beautiful county, cannot but allow that it is next to 

 the best, though so late as the time of Queen Elizabeth it was 

 spoken of by Stowe, the annalist, as not in England at all, but " a 

 fourth part of Britaine," the other three being England, Scotland, 

 and Wales ; and time was when Devonshire was part of Cornwall, 

 with Exeter, it is thought, for its capital, which city was till the 

 tenth century inhabited conjointly by Cornish and Saxons. The 

 Cornish were driven across the Tamar by Athelstane, and it was 

 declared death for one to be found east of its banks — a fact that 

 militates strongly against Professor Huxley's idea that the peace- 

 able and law-loving Devonshire men have as much Celtic blood in 

 them as the violent and lawless Tipperary boys. According to 

 Professor Max Muller, the Cornish, too, are peculiar as a people. 

 They were once Celts, but by the extinction of their old vernacular, 

 without any change of blood, they have become Teutons. 



The old language of Cornwall, which did not altogether cease to 

 be spoken till the end of last century, used to be thouglit Semitic, 

 and allied to the Hebrew, having been introduced by the Phoeni- 

 cians. Some also have questioned whether the aboriginal inhabi- 

 tants were not akin to the people now inhabiting the Basque 

 provinces, Lapland and Finland, whoso ton ue belongs to the 

 Turanian class of languages. But though tlie literary remains of 

 the old vernacular are very scanty, yet, embracing as they do a 

 vocabulary of the language as it was spoken before the conquest, 

 and another (and also a grammar of it) as it was used about a 

 century before its final extinction as a spoken language, philologists 

 are able to assert witli confidence that it belonged to the Aryan 

 family, was Celtic, and very much resembled the languages of 



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