interested in our mistake, has had the kindness
himself to point it out to us. "In 1824," this
gentleman writes, "there was a choral fragment
current in Cornwall, limited to these words –
                    "'And shall Trelawney die;
    Here's twenty thousand Cornish men or underground
    Will know the reason why.'
After much fruitless endeavour to recover
more of the old song, but without the slightest
success, I wrote the verses which have
reached your hands, and inserted them in a
Plymouth newspaper anonymously. It elated
me not a little to find, in after years, that my
verses were deemed by Mr. Davies Gilbert to
be the original ballad (he reprinted them at his
private press); and to discover their effect on
Sir Walter Scott, who regarded them as the
solitary people-song of the seventeenth century."

Scott's remark to this effect occurs in a
note to the fourth volume of his collected
poems. We should have been guarded against
a like mistake, and should also have made
earlier acquaintance with a series of poems
remarkable for their feeling and grace of
expression, if the volume* in which Mr.
Hawker subsequently reprinted his modern-
antique, as the Song of the Western Men,
had obtained the notice and circulation which
it seems to us to have better deserved than
many collections of verse with much higher
pretension.
* Ecclesia ; a volume of Poems by the Rev. R. S. Hawker,
M. A., Vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall. Oxford, 1840.

Mr. Hawker is apparently still under the
impression, that even of the burden to the
old song only the fragment he quotes in his
letter to us had been preserved. We believe
he will find, however, that the entire burden
which was added to our reprint, and for
which we had the corroborative authority
of one of the living representatives of the
Trelawney family, is an authentic part of the old
poem. This impression is confirmed in another
letter, correcting our mistake, addressed to
us also by a clergyman, to whom all the facts
of the modern adaptation of these celebrated
stanzas appear to be well known. "The
chorus, I should say, does not appear in
Mr. Hawker's poem; but on reading it, I
recollected the burthen of a song which
my mother, a Cornishwoman, had sung to
me when a child, and saw at once that the
two fragments belonged to the same ballad.
My mother's song was
    "'And shall they scorn Tre, Pol, and Pen,
        And shall Trelawney die?
    There's twice ten thousand Cornishmen
        Will know the reason why.'"

THE "LOGGING" STONE.

WE have another Cornish score to clear: –
In an article entitled "Still on the Wing,"
in No. 112 of Household Words, there
appeared an account of the overthrow of the
famous Logan or "Logging" Stone; which,
although substantially correct, has been
thought to have left a slur on the character
of a meritorious naval officer, not deserved.
With the view of removing it, we have lately
received Lieutenant Goldsmith's own version
of his freak, written soon after it was
perpetrated, and while he was being assailed with
the most inveterate censure by all the
antiquaries and newspapers of the locality.
Many statements exaggerated his culpability;
and, in order to clear himself in the eyes of
his mother – whose good opinion he most
coveted – he wrote to her the following
account of the affair: –

"Penzance, April 24, 1824.

"THE facts in question, my dear Mother, are
these:

"On the 8th of this month we were off the
Land's-End, near the spot where the Rock stood.
Our boats were creeping along shore beneath it for
some goods which, we suspected, might be sunk in
the sands near it. I took the opportunity of landing
to look at the Logan Rock with my mate; and,
hearing that it was not in the power of man to
remove it, I took it into my head to try my skill,
and, at this time (half-past four o'clock, P.M.), the
boats having finished what they had to do, and it
blowing too fresh for them to creep any longer, I
took them and their crew on shore with me, and,
having landed at the foot of the rocks, we all
scrambled up the precipice. We had with us, at
first, three hand-spikes, with which we tried to move
the Rock, and could not do it. The hand-spikes
were then laid aside, and the nine men who were
with me took hold of the Rock by the edge, and,
without great difficulty, set it in a rocking motion,
which became so great, that I was fearful of bidding
them try to stop it lest it should fall back upon us,
and away it went unfortunately, clean over upon its
side, where it now rests. There was not an instrument
of any kind or description near the Rock
when thrown over, except one hand-spike, and that I
had in my hand, but which was of no use in upsetting
the Rock; and this is the truth, and nothing but
the truth, as I hope for salvation.

"For my part, I had no intention, or the most
distant thought, of doing mischief, even had I
thrown the Rock into the sea. I was innocently, as
my God knows, employed, as far as any bad design
about me. I knew not that this Rock was so
idolized in this neighbourhood, and you may
imagine my astonishment when I found all Penzance
in an uproar. I was to be transported at least; the
newspapers have traduced me, and made me worse
than a murderer, and the base falsehoods in them
are more than wicked. But, here I am, my dear
Mother, still holding up my head, boldly conscious
of having only committed an act of inadvertency.
Be not uneasy – my character is yet safe; and you
have nothing on that score to make you uneasy. I
have many friends in Penzance: amongst them the
persons most interested in the Rock, and many who
were most violent now see the thing in its true
light. I intend putting the bauble in its place
again, and hope to get as much credit as I have
anger for throwing it down."

We are furnished, also, with a copy of a
letter from the agent of the proprietor of the