12. _The Story of John of Chy-an-Hur_.—This is a popular tale of some length, of a labouring man who lived at Chy-an-Hur, or the Ram’s House, in St. Levan, and went east seeking work, and of what befell him. It is the _Tale of the Three Advices_, found in many forms. It appears first in Lhuyd’s Grammar, printed in 1707, where it has a Welsh translation. Lhuyd says that it “was written about forty years since,” which dates it _circ._ 1667. Part of it, undated, but in the hand of John Boson, occurs with an English translation in the Gwavas MS. (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 28,554). This, as appears by a note on the back of the first leaf, was written out for Gwavas’s instruction in Cornish. The spelling is altogether different from Lhuyd’s. Another copy in Cornish of Lhuyd’s spelling, with an English translation, is in the Borlase MS., copied from the lost MS. of Thomas Tonkin, with some corrections by Dr. Borlase. It was printed with Lhuyd’s Welsh and an English version, in Pryce’s _Archæologia Cornu-Britannica_ in 1790, and by Davies Gilbert at the end of his edition of Jordan’s _Creation_, 1827, in Cornish and English. The English versions of Borlase, Pryce, and Davies Gilbert are substantially the same, and are probably Tonkin’s. An English version, translated from Lhuyd’s Welsh, but pretended to be from Cornish, was printed in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ in 1818, and again in an abridged and expurgated form in Mr. J. Jacob’s collection of Celtic Fairy Tales in 1891. There is a much amplified version of the story in English in William Botterell’s _Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall_, published at Penzance in 1870, and a short and rather foolish one in Hunt’s _Popular Romances of the West of England_, 1865, 1871, 1881. The language is a good specimen of the latest Cornish. The same story is given as an Irish folk-tale in an early volume of _Chambers’s Journal_.
13. The Preface to the Cornish Grammar in Lhuyd’s _Archæologia Britannica_. This consists of two and a quarter folio pages of close print, and is written in the Cornish of his own day. It is the work of a foreigner, but is nevertheless very well done. A not very good translation, probably the work of Tonkin and Gwavas, is given by Pryce, and reprinted by Polwhele in the fifth volume of his History.