QUEEN GUINEVERE.
[To rim EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—Just now, when we naturally are thinking much of the names and characters which Tennyson has brought near to us, it may be interesting to your readers to hear of an echo of Queen Guinevere's name, which is still heard in this remote parish, on the border of the sea where Lyonesse once was.
Guinver Sande" is the present name of a beach between this place and the Land's End ; and " Genefer " was, in St. Just, up to about fifty years ago, one of the commonest names for girls, as the baptismal registers testify. There are now several girls in the parish who were christened " Geneva," which is evidently a fashionable rendering of the good old name. I once, in giving a Sunday-School prize to a child so named, ventured to restore the ancient spelling, and I greatly offended the poor child, who had an idea that it was a name only used for very -old and very poor women. As illustrating the death of a tradition, I may mention that a very old man, since dead, told me that when he was working underground as a little lad, he remembered old men using the old Cornish words in many of the common actions of their daily work, but that they were very much laughed at for doing so ; and thus, as my friend grew up, the old British words fell out of use.
I have often advised parents among my parishioners to whom little daughters have been born to give them the name of Genefer, or even Guinevere, but I have not as yet succeeded in any case ; let me pass on the suggestion to those who are pleasantly linked together each week as readers of the
[Perhaps the sense of the Idylls has filtered down and the name was considered unlucky. Neither has Jezebel ever been adopted, though it is Biblical.—En. Spectator.]
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