applied as an arrestor of criminals, is still vividly remembered. Before his execution, Mr. Bedford once more visited and had a very solemn and affecting interview with him. It is remarkable that just before the perpetration of the act which cost him his life, Tawell received a solemn warning, though not through Mr. 'Bedford. At a Quakers' meeting, attended by Tawell and his wife one Sunday, as was their wont, a minister from Yorkshire was present, and one to whom Tawell's position was entirely unknown. After the usual silent preliminaries, the minister rose and delivered an address of extraordinary earnestness and solemnity. A feeling, he said, had taken possession of his mind, for which he could not account, except on the supposition that some one present contemplated an extremely wicked act; and then, proceeding in his discourse, he expressed his belief that if his warning voice, now raised, were not heeded, the unknown individual, to whom his words applied, would never again receive a similar offer of mercy and recall. Mr. Tallack declares he has repeatedly heard this striking circumstance narrated, and has been told that, after leaving the meeting house, Tawell's wife said, 'John, what a remarkable sermon that was. Why, one would think we had a murderer amongst us!'

Of Mr. Bedford's happy manner and abundant success in assisting youths and young men in situations away from home; of his fostering care for them, and his encouragement of their efforts; of his kindly and faithful warnings when he feared they were yielding to temptation; of the interest he took in the marriages and settlement in life of his young friends; of the frequency with which he was a welcome guest at their weddings, or extended to them the hospitalities of his own house; of his earnest quest for opportunities to do good, and his punctual and effectual grasp of them; and of his large devotion of time to religious and humane labours, both here and on the European continent, his biographer gives abundant interesting proof. During the last few years of his life his strength declined. Symptoms of heart-disease made exertion unadvisable; but the star of his life set peacefully and serenely, and he retained his brightness of intellect, and even the remarkable child-like freshness of his complexion, almost to the last week of his life. Consoling passages of Scripture were in his mouth and heart; loving and assiduous friends were about him; and gently, almost imperceptibly, as in tranquil slumber, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, Peter Bedford passed into the spiritual world.

ART.

ART. V.-CORNWALL AND THE CORNISH.

1. Cornwall and its Coasts. By Alphonse Esquiros. London: Chapman and Hall.

2. Cornwall; Its Mines and Miners, with Sketches of Scenery. London: Longmans.

3. A Londoner's Walk to the Land's End. By Walter White. London: Chapman and Hall.

4. Mineral Statistics of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, for 1864. By Robert Hunt, F.R.S. London: Longmans.

5. Letters on the Social Condition of Cornish Miners. By Wm. Tayler, F.R.C.S. Published in the 'Western Morning News.'

6. Popular Romances of the West of England, with the Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. Col

lected and edited by Robert Hunt, F.R.S. London: J. C. Hotten.

7. Journals of the Bath and West of England Society. London: Ridgway.

8. The Cassiterides. By George Smith, LL.D. London: Longmans, 1863.

C

YUVIER used to find in a fossil bone the whole history of the animal to which it belonged. Geology offers even more interesting information to the student who has any faculty for induction. The geological map of a country will tell him at a glance the modes of life of the inhabitants. Glancing, for instance, at the black-tinted spaces representing the coal fields of Staffordshire or South Wales, he would infer at once that the people who lived there were very different from the people dwelling on the lightly-tinted chalk hills of Dorsetshire. In the latter district he would look to find a people of primitive manners, narrow intellect, most imperfect education, and possessing a great reverence for the classes above them in the social scale. In the former he would expect to meet with men of great shrewdness, energy, and self-reliance, with very little veneration for their betters' in worldly position. For the one district he would draw mental pictures

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pictures of hamlets thinly scattered over vast ranges of pasture land, and thousands of sheep covering the grassy downs. For the other he would conjure up visions of great masses of men crowding together in large and dirty towns, overhung by a never-dispersed pall of smoke, hiding both sun and sky. The simple shepherd of Dorsetshire is the logical result of the chalk formation; the shrewd miner of Staffordshire is equally the logical result of the coal measures. Change the stratum and you change the race so far as its habits go. The men have the same origin, yet they are as dissimilar in mind as coal and chalk are dissimilar in colour. Nor is it necessary to go to counties widely apart to find instances of this dissimilarity. De la Beche has contrasted two adjacent counties and their inhabitants, the agricultural labourers on the poor lands of the carbonaceous rocks in North Devon, and the miners of Cornwall. He says, 'While the former are thinly distributed over the county, full of prejudices against improvements the miners are thickly congregated in the neighbourhood of the working lodes, abound with intelligence, and from the constant exercise of their judgment are able to take correct and enlarged views of many other subjects than those immediately connected with their ordinary pursuits. This contrast is evidently due to the difference of geologic formations; for if the granite, slate, and metalliferous veins of the one were transferred to the area now occupied by the sandstones and shales of the other, there is no reason why the population at present occupying North Devon should not be mentally as far advanced as the generality of Cornish miners.'

There is certainly no county in England where the physical geography and the geology have so much influence upon the character of the inhabitants as Cornwall. A long narrow peninsula, all but meer-umschlungen,' lying at the remotest corner of the kingdom, with an extent of coast much beyond that of any other county, Cornwall seems to have far more to do with that great world of waters which lies beyond it and around it, than with the land behind it, and with which it has but scanty communication. The roads are not thoroughfares, as in other counties. They necessarily stop short when they get to Finis Terræ. The business of its inhabitants does not lie upon the highways, but in the deep of the sea and the deep of the earth. Thus the common toast, without which no Cornish feast is regular, is Fish, tin, and copper.' The labouring population is, according to the general estimation, divided into the two great races of fishermen and miners, each a hardy race, much exposed to dangers

that

that demand thoughtfulness and prudence, and promote selfreliance and courage. There are, indeed, the tillers of the land, and even in agriculture the Cornishmen offer peculiarities, for Cornwall is the market garden of England, the source whence Covent Garden derives its main supply of early vegetables. But it is in the miners and the fishermen that we see the characteristics of the Cornish race most strongly marked. Not less than a tenth of the whole population of Cornwall is engaged in mining. The proportion engaged in fishing is no doubt considerably smaller, but is still large; and although the number employed in agriculture is as high as that occupied in mining, it is considerably below that of the agricultural class in other counties. In no county, moreover, does the farm labourer exercise an important social influence. His work is too much a matter of course and routine to develope his faculties. He is but a servant, and often little better than a serf, an adscriptus gleba. But the miner and the fisherman are their own masters, and have to exercise all their faculties. It is by reason of these men that Cornubians have a character so distinctive.

There is, however, another circumstance that has tended powerfully to distinguish them from the inhabitants of the other parts of England. They have a different origin. According to the legend, an eastern queen, doubtless a Phoenician, undertook a long sea voyage in order to see with her own eyes that famous Cornish coast which was known to be so rich in metals. The vessel which bore the adventurous heroine was wrecked on the same coast. Most of her courtiers were drowned, but the sailors being good swimmers saved both themselves and their sovereign. They built her a hut on the shore out of the wreck of the ship. They knelt down and did her homage. After a time her subjects grew tired of court formalities, in a country where each man had to work with his own hands, and had no time to spare for ceremonies. The queen grieved as she saw her attendants one after another forsaking courtly duties for the more active labours of fishing, hunting, and building. But at last Zenobia took a sensible view of her position. She allowed her maidens to be wooed by the sailors, and she herself was won by a young fisherman. They lived happily and had many children, the progenitors of the Cornubians of to-day, who are thus sprung from a royal stock, and are akin to the men of old Tyre and Sidon. There is an historical element in this legend. The inhabitants of Cornwall, like the other Kelts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, have undoubtedly an oriental origin. They had also relations with the Phoenicians, relations of trade if not of intermarriage.

intermarriage. It is curious, by the way, to notice how popular traditions, current perhaps until half a century ago, and subsequently discredited by learned men, have still more lately been confirmed by more skilful philologists. The theory which ascribed to the Cornubians an oriental origin, was ridiculed by some of the antiquarians of a generation ago, who took for granted that because a story had obtained. popular belief it was wholly false. But recent researches, and a better acquaintance with eastern languages, have shewn unmistakably that the popular tradition had a good foundation. Who can tell but that geology will pass through the same stages as ethnology and philology are passing; and that having reached the stage at which it is considered a mark of wisdom to reject as childish the traditions of six thousand years, we shall after the attainment of fuller knowledge discover that the old belief was the true theory, and its modern substitute the false?

There is no portion of the British Empire which has given. rise to so much controversy among antiquarians as Cornwall. There is no county with such abundance of legendary annals. The legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table alone has given rise to quite a literature of its own. There are few Englishmen who will not desire to cherish that legend as veritable history, and there is little doubt that it has a considerable substratum of fact. Geology even seems to lend probability to the tale, by indicating that the lost land of Lyonesse may have had a real existence. Trustworthy records prove how great ravages the sea has made among the isles of Scilly, and it is quite within the range of possibility that the same destructive agency may have overwhelmed the land lying between the isles and Land's End, which according to the tradition once bore on its surface 140 towns or villages, with their churches. As to the connection of the Cornubians with the East, there are innumerable traces in the language and the antiquities of the country to show that the people spoke a tongue of Aryan origin, and that they worshipped the same gods as the fire and sun worshippers of the East. A no less learned man than Sir George Cornewall Lewis discarded the generally received belief that the Phoenicians traded with Cornwall. But a very competent combatant has appeared in behalf of the popular tradition, and in his 'Cassiterides' Dr. George Smith has clearly gained the best of the controversy, a fact which we believe the illustrious author of The Astronomy of the Antients' himself confessed. After all there is nothing incredible in the old story. It is not surprising that a nation sufficiently enterprising to

establish