Project Gutenberg's George Borrow and His Circle, by Clement King Shorter

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: George Borrow and His Circle
       Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of
              Borrow And His Friends

Author: Clement King Shorter

Release Date: November 12, 2006 [EBook #19767]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GEORGE BORROW AND HIS CIRCLE ***




Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive/Million
Book Project).

George Henry Borrow

From a painting by Henry Wyndham Phillips

GEORGE BORROW

AND HIS CIRCLE

WHEREIN MAY BE FOUND MANY HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF BORROW AND HIS FRIENDS

BY

CLEMENT KING SHORTER

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1913

TO

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL

A FRIEND OF LONG YEARS AND A TRUE

LOVER OF GEORGE BORROW

C. K. S.

Transcriber's Notes: Minor typos have been corrected. There is Persian and Russian writing in this book, which have been marked as [Persian] or as [Russian]. In this text, full page illustrations used the same page number as the previous non illustration page, so, for example, there were two page 16. I have added an a after the illustration page number for the sake of clarity.

[Pg v]

PREFACE

I have to express my indebtedness first of all to the executors of Henrietta MacOubrey, George Borrow's stepdaughter, who kindly placed Borrow's letters and manuscripts at my disposal. To the survivor of these executors, a lady who resides in an English provincial town, I would particularly wish to render fullest acknowledgment did she not desire to escape all publicity and forbid me to give her name in print. I am indebted to Sir William Robertson Nicoll without whose kindly and active intervention I should never have taken active steps to obtain the material to which this biography owes its principal value. I am under great obligations to Mr. Herbert Jenkins, the publisher, in that, although the author of a successful biography of Borrow, he has, with rare kindliness, brought me into communication with Mr. Wilfrid J. Bowring, the grandson of Sir John Bowring. To Mr. Wilfrid Bowring I am indebted in that he has handed to me the whole of Borrow's letters to his grandfather. I have to thank Mr. James Hooper of Norwich for the untiring zeal with which he has unearthed for me a valuable series of notes including[Pg vi] certain interesting letters concerning Borrow. Mr. Hooper has generously placed his collection, with which he at one time contemplated writing a biography of Borrow, in my hands. I thank Dr. Aldis Wright for reading my chapter on Edward FitzGerald; also Mr. W.H. Peet, Mr. Aleck Abrahams, and Mr. Joseph Shaylor for assistance in the little known field of Sir Richard Phillips's life. I have further to thank my friends, Edward Clodd and Thomas J. Wise, for reading my proof-sheets. To Theodore Watts-Dunton, an untiring friend of thirty years, I have also to acknowledge abundant obligations.

C. K. S.

[Pg vii]

CONTENTS

[Pg xi]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FULL-PAGE PLATES

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

[Pg xv]

INTRODUCTION

It is now exactly seventeen years ago since I published a volume not dissimilar in form to this under the title of Charlotte Brontë and her Circle. The title had then an element of novelty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Dante and his Circle, at the time the only book of this particular character, having quite another aim. There are now some twenty or more biographies based upon a similar plan.[1] The method has its convenience where there are earlier lives of a given writer, as one can in this way differentiate the book from previous efforts by making one's hero stand out among his friends. Some such apology, I feel, is necessary, because, in these days of the multiplication of books, every book, at least other than a work of imagination, requires ample apology. In Charlotte Brontë and her Circle I was able to claim that, even though following in the footsteps of Mrs. Gaskell, I had added some four hundred new letters by Charlotte Brontë to the world's knowledge of that interesting woman, and still more considerably enlarged our knowledge of her sister Emily. This achievement has been generously acknowledged, and I am most proud of the testimony of the most accomplished of living biographers, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who once rendered me the following quite spontaneous tribute:[Pg xvi]

With such a testimony before me I cannot hesitate to present my second biography in similar form. In the case of George Borrow, however, I am not in a position to supplement one transcendent biography, as in the case of Charlotte Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell. I have before me no less than four biographies of Borrow, every one of them of distinctive merit. These are:

All of these books have contributed something of value and importance to the subject. Dr. Knapp's work it is easiest to praise because he is dead.[2] His biography of Borrow was the effort of a lifetime. A scholar with great linguistic qualifications for writing the biography of an author whose knowledge of languages was one of[Pg xvii] his titles to fame, Dr. Knapp spared neither time nor money to achieve his purpose. Starting with an article in The Chautauquan Magazine in 1887, which was reprinted in pamphlet form, Dr. Knapp came to England—to Norwich—and there settled down to write a Life of Borrow, which promised at one time to develop into several volumes. As well it might, for Dr. Knapp reached Norfolk at a happy moment for his purpose. Mrs. MacOubrey, Borrow's stepdaughter, was in the humour to sell her father's manuscripts and books. They were offered to the city of Norwich; there was some talk of Mr. Jeremiah Coleman, M.P., whose influence and wealth were overpowering in Norwich at the time, buying them. Finally, a very considerable portion of the collection came into the hands of Mr. Webber, a bookseller of Ipswich, who later became associated with the firm of Jarrold of Norwich. From Webber Dr. Knapp purchased the larger portion, and, as his bibliography indicates (Life, vol. ii. pp. 355-88), he became possessed of sundry notebooks which furnish a record of certain of Borrow's holiday tours, about a hundred letters from and to Borrow, and a considerable number of other documents. The result, as I have indicated, was a book that abounded in new facts and is rich in new material. It was not, however, a book for popular reading. You must love the subject before you turn to this book with any zest. It is a book for your true Borrovian, who is thankful for any information about the word-master, not for the casual reader, who might indeed be alienated from the subject by this copious memoir. The result was somewhat discouraging. There were not enough of true Borrovians in those years, and the book was not received too generously. The two volumes have gone out of[Pg xviii] print and have not reached a second edition. Time however, will do them justice. As it is, your good Borrow lover has always appreciated their merits. Take Lionel Johnson for example, a good critic and a master of style. After saying that these 'lengthy and rich volumes are a monument of love's labour, but not of literary art or biographical skill,' he adds: 'Of his over eight hundred pages there is not one for which I am not grateful' and every new biographer of Borrow is bound to re-echo that sentiment. Dr. Knapp did the spade work and other biographers have but entered into his inheritance. Dr. Knapp's fine collection of Borrow books and manuscripts was handed over by his widow to the American nation—to the Hispanic Society of New York. Dr. Knapp's biography was followed nine years later by a small volume by Mr. R. A. J. Walling, whose little book adds considerably to our knowledge of Borrow's Cornish relatives, and is in every way a valuable monograph on the author of Lavengro. Mr. Herbert Jenkins's book is more ambitious. Within four hundred closely printed pages he has compressed every incident in Borrow's career, and we would not quarrel with him nor his publisher for calling his life a 'definitive biography' if one did not know that there is not and cannot be anything 'definitive' about a biography except in the case of a Master. Boswell, Lockhart, Mrs. Gaskell are authors who had the advantage of knowing personally the subjects of their biographies. Any biographer who has not met his hero face to face and is dependent solely on documents is crippled in his undertaking. Moreover, such a biographer is always liable to be in a manner superseded or at least supplemented by the appearance of still more documents. However, Mr. Jenkins's excellent biography has the[Pg xix] advantage of many new documents from Mr. John Murray's archives and from the Record Office Manuscripts. His work was the first to make use of the letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society, which the Rev. T. H. Darlow has published as a book under that title, a book to which I owe him an acknowledgment for such use of it as I have made, as also for permission to reproduce the title-page of Borrow's Basque version of St. Luke's gospel. There only remains for me to say a word in praise of Mr. Edward Thomas's fine critical study of Borrow which was published under the title of George Borrow: The Man and his Books. Mr. Thomas makes no claim to the possession of new documents. This brings me to such excuse as I can make for perpetrating a fifth biography. When Mrs. MacOubrey, Borrow's stepdaughter, the 'Hen.' of Wild Wales and the affectionate companion of his later years, sold her father's books and manuscripts—and she always to her dying day declared that she had no intention of parting with the manuscripts, which were, she said, taken away under a misapprehension—she did not, of course, part with any of his more private documents. All the more intimate letters of Borrow were retained. At her death these passed to her executors, from whom I have purchased all legal rights in the publication of Borrow's hitherto unpublished manuscripts and letters. I trust that even to those who may disapprove of the discursive method with which—solely for my own pleasure—I have written this book, will at least find a certain biographical value in the many new letters by and to George Borrow that are to be found in its pages. The book has taken me ten years to write, and has been a labour of love.

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN BORROW OF THE WEST NORFOLK MILITIA

George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham, Norfolk, on the 5th of July 1803. It pleased him to state on many an occasion that he was born at East Dereham.

he writes in the opening lines of Lavengro, using almost the identical phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung. Here is a later memory of Dereham from Lavengro:

[Pg 2]

Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of Lavengro know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing for a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of The Task.

Yet Borrow was not actually born in East Dereham, but a mile and a half away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet landscape of fields and hedges. You will find the home in which the author of Lavengro first saw the light without much difficulty. It is a fair-sized farm-house, with a long low frontage separated from the road by a considerable strip of garden. It suggests a prosperous yeoman class, and I have known farm-houses in East Anglia not one whit larger dignified by the name of 'hall.' Nearly opposite is a pond. The trim hedges are a delight to us to-day, but you must cast your mind back to a century ago when they were entirely absent. The house belonged to George Borrow's maternal grandfather, Samuel Perfrement, who farmed the adjacent land at this time. Samuel and Mary Perfrement had eight children, the third of whom, Ann, was born in 1772.

In February 1793 Ann Perfrement, aged twenty-one, married Thomas Borrow, aged thirty-five, in the Parish Church of East Dereham, and of the two children that were born to them George Henry Borrow was the younger. Thomas Borrow was the son of one John Borrow of St. Cleer in Cornwall, who[Pg 3] died before this child was born, and is described by his grandson[3] as the scion 'of an ancient but reduced Cornish family,[Pg 4] tracing descent from the de Burghs, and entitled to carry their arms.' This claim, of which I am thoroughly sceptical, is endorsed by Dr. Knapp,[4] who, however, could find no trace of the family earlier than [Pg 5]1678, the old parish registers having been destroyed. When Thomas Borrow was born the family were in any case nothing more than small farmers, and Thomas Borrow and his brothers were working on the land in the intervals of attending the parish school. At the age of eighteen Thomas was apprenticed to a maltster at Liskeard, and about this time he joined the local Militia. Tradition has it that his career as a maltster was cut short by his knocking his master down in a scrimmage. The victor fled from the scene of his prowess, and enlisted as a private soldier in the Coldstream Guards. This was in 1783, and in 1792 he was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia; hence his appearance at East Dereham, where, now a serjeant, his occupations for many a year were recruiting and drilling.[5] It is recorded that at a theatrical performance at East Dereham he first saw, presumably on the stage of the county-hall, his future wife—Ann Perfrement. She was, it seems, engaged in a minor part in a travelling company, not, we may assume, altogether with the sanction of her father, who, in spite of his inheritance of French blood, doubtless shared the then very strong English prejudice against the stage. However, Ann was[Pg 6] one of eight children, and had, as we shall find in after years, no inconsiderable strength of character, and so may well at twenty years of age have decided upon a career for herself. In any case we need not press too hard the Cornish and French origin of George Borrow to explain his wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at the suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was 'supposed to be of gypsy descent by the mother's side.' You have only to think of the father, whose work carried him from time to time to every corner of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence of life in a travelling theatrical company, to explain in no small measure the glorious vagabondage of George Borrow.

Behold then Thomas Borrow and Ann Perfrement as man and wife, he being thirty-five years of age, she twenty-one. A roving, restless life was in front of the pair for many a day, the West Norfolk Militia being stationed in some eight or nine separate towns within the interval of ten years between Thomas Borrow's marriage and his second son's birth. The first child, John Thomas Borrow, was born on the 15th April 1801.[6] The second son, George Henry Borrow, the subject of this memoir, was born in his grandfather's house at Dumpling Green, East Dereham, his mother having found a natural refuge with her father while her husband was busily recruiting in Norfolk. The two children passed with their parents from place to place, and in 1809 we find them once again in East[Pg 7] Dereham. From his son's two books, Lavengro and Wild Wales, we can trace the father's later wanderings until his final retirement to Norwich on a pension. In 1810 the family were at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, when Captain Borrow had to assist in guarding the French prisoners of war; for it was the stirring epoch of the Napoleonic conflict, and within the temporary prison 'six thousand French and other foreigners, followers of the Grand Corsican, were now immured.'

But here we have only to do with Thomas Borrow, of whom we get many a quaint glimpse in Lavengro, our first and our last being concerned with him in the one quality that his son seems to have inherited, as the associate of a prize-fighter—Big Ben Brain. Borrow records in his opening chapter that Ben Brain and his father met in Hyde Park probably in 1790, and that after an hour's conflict 'the champions shook hands and retired, each having experienced quite enough of the other's prowess.' Borrow further relates that four months afterwards Brain 'died in the arms of my father, who read to him the Bible in his last[Pg 8] moments.' Dr. Knapp finds Borrow in one of his many inaccuracies or rather 'imaginings' here, as Brain did not die until 1794. More than once in his after years the old soldier seems to have had a shy pride in that early conflict, although the piety which seems to have come to him with the responsibilities of wife and children led him to count any recalling of the episode as a 'temptation.' When Borrow was about thirteen years of age, he overheard his father and mother discussing their two boys, the elder being the father's favourite and George the mother's:

Borrow throughout his narrative refers to his father as 'a man of excellent common sense,' and he quotes the opinion of William Taylor, who had rather a bad reputation as a 'freethinker' with all the church-going citizens of Norwich, with no little pride. Borrow is of course the 'young man' of the dialogue. He was then eighteen years of age:

When Borrow is twenty years of age we have another glimpse of father and son, the father in his last illness, the son eager as usual to draw out his parent upon the one subject that appeals to his adventurous spirit, 'I should like to know something about Big Ben,' he says:

Concerning the career of Borrow's father there seem to be no documents other than one contained in Lavengro, yet no Life of Borrow can possibly he complete that does not draw boldly upon the son's priceless tributes. And so we come now to the last scene in the career of the elder Borrow—his death-bed—which is also the last page of the first volume of Lavengro. George Borrow's brother has arrived from abroad. The little house in Willow Lane, Norwich, contained the mother and her two sons sorrowfully awaiting the end, which came on 28th February 1824.

Did Borrow's father ever really fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist's imagining? We shall never know. Borrow called his Lavengro 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp in his anxiety to prove that Borrow wrote his own memoirs in Lavengro and Romany Rye tells us that he had no creative faculty—an absurd proposition. But I think we may accept the contest between Ben Brain and Thomas Borrow, and what a revelation of heredity that impressive death-bed scene may be counted. Borrow on one occasion in later life declared that his favourite hooks were the Bible and the Newgate Calendar. We know that he specialised on the Bible and Prize-Fighting in no ordinary fashion—and here we see his father on his death-bed struggling between the religious sentiments of his maturity and the one great worldly escapade of his early manhood.

[Pg 12]

CHAPTER II

BORROW'S MOTHER

Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who seems to have developed into a woman of great strength of character far remote from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young soldier at East Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century. We would gladly know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement. Her father was a farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have already described. He did not, however, 'farm his own little estate' as Borrow declared. The grandfather—a French Protestant—came, if we are to believe Borrow, from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but there is no documentary evidence to support the contention. However, the story of the Huguenot immigration into England is clearly bound up with Norwich and the adjacent district. And so we may well take the name of 'Perfrement' as conclusive evidence of a French origin, and reject as utterly untenable the not unnatural suggestion of Nathaniel Hawthorne, that Borrow's mother was 'of gypsy descent.'[9] She was one of the eight children of Samuel[Pg 13] and Mary Perfrement, all of whom seem to have devoted their lives to East Anglia.[10] We owe to Dr. Knapp's edition of Lavengro one exquisite glimpse of Ann's girlhood that is not in any other issue of the book. Ann's elder sister, curious to know if she was ever to be married, falls in with the current superstition that she must wash her linen and 'watch' it drying before the fire between eleven and twelve at night. Ann Perfrement was ten years old at the time. The two girls walked over to East Dereham, purchased the necessary garment, washed it in the pool near the house that may still be seen, and watched and watched. Suddenly when the clock struck twelve they heard, or thought they heard, a footstep on the path, the wind howled, and the elder sister sprang to the door, locked and bolted it, and then fell in convulsions on the floor. The superstition, which Borrow seems to have told his mother had a Danish origin, is common enough in Ireland and in Celtic lands. It could scarcely have been thus rehearsed by two Norfolk children had they not had the blood of a more imaginative race in their veins. In addition to this we find more than one effective glimpse of Borrow's mother in Lavengro. We have already noted the episode in which she takes the side of her younger boy against her husband, with whom John was the favourite. We meet her again in the following dialogue, with its pathetic allusions to Dante and to the complaint—a kind of nervous exhaustion which he called 'the horrors'—that was to trouble Borrow all his days:[Pg 14]

Our next glimpse of Mrs. Borrow is when after his father's death George had shouldered his knapsack and made his way to London to seek his fortune by literature. His elder brother had remained at home, determined upon being a painter, but joined George in[Pg 15] London, leaving the widowed mother momentarily alone in Norwich.

Ann Borrow lived in Willow Lane, Norwich, for thirty-three years. That Borrow was a devoted husband these pages will show. He was also a devoted son. When he had made a prosperous marriage he tried hard to persuade his mother to live with him at Oulton, but all in vain. She had the wisdom to see that such an arrangement is rarely conducive to a son's domestic happiness. She continued to live in the little cottage made sacred by many associations until almost the end of her days. Here she had lived in earlier years with her husband and her two ambitious boys, and in Norwich, doubtless, she had made her own friendships, although of these no record remains. The cottage still stands in its modest court, but is[Pg 16] at the moment untenanted. There is a letter extant from Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, who wrote The Life of Mrs. Opie, to Mary Borrow at Oulton, when Mrs. Borrow the elder had gone to live there, which records the fact that in 1851, two years after Mrs. Borrow had left the cottage in Willow Lane, it had already changed its appearance. Mrs. Brightwell writes:

The house was the property of Thomas King, a carpenter. You enter from Willow Lane through a covered passage into what was then known as King's Court. Here the little house faces you, and you meet it with a peculiarly agreeable sensation, recalling more than one incident in Lavengro that transpired there. In 1897 the then mayor made the one attempt of his city of a whole half century to honour Borrow by calling this court Borrow's Court—thereby conferring a ridiculously small distinction upon Borrow,[13] and removing a landmark connected with one of its own worthy citizens. For Thomas King, the carpenter, was in direct descent in the maternal line from the family of Parker, which gave to Norwich one of its most distinguished sons in the famous Archbishop of Queen Elizabeth's day. He extended his business as carpenter sufficiently to die a prosperous builder. Of his two sons one, also named Thomas, became physician to Prince Talleyrand, and married a sister of John Stuart Mill.[14] All this by the way, but there is little more to record of Borrow's mother apart from the letters addressed to her by her son, which occur in their due place in these records. Yet one little memorandum among my papers which bears Mrs. Borrow's signature may well find place here:

[Pg 16a]

THE BORROW HOUSE, NORWICH

The house is situated in Borrow's Court, formerly King's Court, Willow Lane, St. Giles's, Norwich, and here Borrow lived at intervals from 1816 to his marriage in 1839. His mother lived here for thirty-three years until 1849; his father died here, and is buried in the neighbouring churchyard of St. Giles's.

[Pg 17]

Ann Borrow.

[Pg 18]

CHAPTER III

JOHN THOMAS BORROW

John Thomas Borrow was born two years before his younger brother, that is, on the 15th April 1801. His father, then Serjeant Borrow, was wandering from town to town, and it is not known where his elder son first saw the light. John Borrow's nature was cast in a somewhat different mould from that of his brother. He was his father's pride. Serjeant Borrow could not understand George with his extraordinary taste for the society of queer people—the wild Irish and the ragged Romanies. John had far more of the normal in his being. Borrow gives us in Lavengro our earliest glimpse of his brother:

John received his early education at the Norwich Grammar School, while the younger brother was kept under the paternal wing. Father and mother, with their younger boy George, were always on the move, passing from county to county and from country to country, as Serjeant Borrow, soon to be Captain, attended to his duties of drilling and recruiting, now in England, now in Scotland, now in Ireland. We are given a fascinating glimpse of John Borrow in Lavengro by way of a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Borrow over the education of their children. It was agreed that while the family were in Edinburgh the boys should be sent to the High School, and so at the historic school that Sir Walter Scott had attended a generation before the two boys were placed, John being removed from the Norwich Grammar School for the purpose. Among his many prejudices of after years Borrow's dislike of Scott was perhaps the most regrettable, otherwise he would have gloried in the fact that their childhood had had one remarkable point in common. Each boy took part in the feuds between the Old Town and the New Town. Exactly as Scott records his prowess at 'the manning of the Cowgate Port,' and the combats maintained with great vigour, 'with stones, and sticks, and fisticuffs,' as set forth in the first volume of Lockhart, so we have not dissimilar feats set down in Lavengro. Side[Pg 20] by side also with the story of 'Green-Breeks,' which stands out in Scott's narrative of his school combats, we have the more lurid account by Borrow of David Haggart. Literary biography is made more interesting by such episodes of likeness and of contrast.

We next find John Borrow in Ireland with his father, mother, and brother. George is still a child, but he is precocious enough to be learning the language, and thus laying the foundation of his interest in little-known tongues. John is now an ensign in his father's regiment. 'Ah! he was a sweet being, that boy soldier, a plant of early promise, bidding fair to become in after time all that is great, good, and admirable.' Ensign John tells his little brother how pleased he is to find himself, although not yet sixteen years old, 'a person in authority with many Englishmen under me. Oh! these last six weeks have passed like hours in heaven.' That was in 1816, and we do not meet John again until five years later, when we hear of him rushing into the water to save a drowning man, while twenty others were bathing who might have rendered assistance. Borrow records once again his father's satisfaction:

In the interval the war had ended, and Napoleon had departed for St. Helena. Peace had led to the pensioning of militia officers, or reducing to half-pay of the juniors. The elder Borrow had settled in Norwich. George was set to study at the Grammar School there,[Pg 21] while his brother worked in Old Crome's studio, for here was a moment when Norwich had its interesting Renaissance, and John Borrow was bent on being an artist. He had worked with Crome once before—during the brief interval that Napoleon was at Elba—but now he set to in real earnest, and we have evidence of a score of pictures by him that were catalogued In the exhibitions of the Norwich Society of Artists between the years 1817 and 1824. They include one portrait of the artist's father, and two of his brother George.[15] Old Crome died in 1821, and then John went to London to study under Haydon. Borrow declares that his brother had real taste for painting, and that 'if circumstances had not eventually diverted his mind from the pursuit, he would have attained excellence, and left behind him some enduring monument of his powers,' 'He lacked, however,' he tells us, 'one thing, the want of which is but too often fatal to the sons of genius, and without which genius is little more than a splendid toy in the hands of the possessor—perseverance, dogged perseverance.' It is when he is thus commenting on his brother's characteristics that Borrow gives his own fine if narrow eulogy of Old Crome. John Borrow seems to have continued his studies in London under Haydon for a year, and then to have gone to Paris to copy pictures at the[Pg 22] Louvre. He mentions a particular copy that he made of a celebrated picture by one of the Italian masters, for which a Hungarian nobleman paid him well. His three years' absence was brought to an abrupt termination by news of his father's illness. He returned to Norwich in time to stand by that father's bedside when he died. The elder Borrow died, as we have seen, in February 1824. The little home in King's Court was kept on for the mother, and as John was making money by his pictures it was understood that he should stay with her. On the 1st April, however, George started for London, carrying the manuscript of Romantic Ballads from the Danish to Sir Richard Phillips, the publisher. On the 29th of the same month he was joined by his brother John. John had come to London at his own expense, but in the interests of the Norwich Town Council. The council wanted a portrait of one of its mayors for St. Andrew's Hall—that Valhalla of Norwich municipal worthies which still strikes the stranger as well-nigh unique in the city life of England. The municipality would fain have encouraged a fellow-citizen, and John Borrow had been invited to paint the portrait. 'Why,' it was asked, 'should the money go into a stranger's pocket and be spent in London?' John, however, felt diffident of his ability and declined, and this in spite of the fact that the £100 offered for the portrait must have been very tempting. 'What a pity it was,' he said, 'that Crome was dead.' 'Crome,' said the orator of the deputation that had called on John Borrow,

At the mention of the heroic John bethought himself of Haydon, and suggested his name; hence his visit to London, and his proposed interview with Haydon. The two brothers went together to call upon the 'painter of the heroic' at his studio in Connaught Terrace, Hyde Park. There was some difficulty about their admission, and it turned out afterwards that Haydon thought they might be duns, as he was very hard up at the time. His eyes glistened at the mention of the £100. 'I am not very fond of painting portraits,' he said, 'but a mayor is a mayor, and there is something grand in that idea of the Norman arch.' And thus Mayor Hawkes came to be painted by Benjamin Haydon, and his portrait may be found, not without diligent search, among the many municipal worthies that figure on the walls of that most picturesque old Hall in Norwich. Here is Borrow's description of the painting:

John Borrow described Robert Hawkes to his brother as a person of many qualifications:

Haydon, who makes no mention of the Borrows in his Correspondence or Autobiography, although there is one letter of George Borrow's to him in the latter work, had been in jail for debt three years prior to the visit of the Borrows. He was then at work on his greatest success in 'the heroic'—The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas nineteen feet long by fifteen high. The debt was one to house decorators, for the artist had ever large ideas. The bailiff, he tells us,[17] was so agitated at the sight of the painting of Lazarus in the studio that he cried out, 'Oh, my God! Sir, I won't arrest you. Give me your word to meet me at twelve at the attorney's, and I'll take it.' In 1821 Haydon married, and a little later we find him again 'without a single shilling in the world—with a large picture before me not half done.' In April 1822 he is arrested at the instance of his colourman, 'with whom I had dealt for fifteen years,' and in November of the same year he is arrested again at the instance of 'a miserable apothecary.' In April 1823 we find him in the King's Bench Prison, from which he was released in July. The Raising of Lazarus meanwhile had gone to pay his upholsterer £300, and his Christ's Entry into Jerusalem had been sold for £240, although it had brought him £3000 in receipts at exhibitions. Clearly heroic pictures did not pay, and Haydon here took up 'the torment of portrait-painting' as he called it.

[Pg 24a]

ROBERT HAWKES, MAYOR OF NORWICH in 1824.

From the painting by Benjamin Haydon in St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich. This portrait has its association with Borrow in that his brother John was sent to London to request Haydon to paint it, and Borrow describes the picture in Lavengro.

[Pg 25]

Perhaps it was Mayor Hawkes who helped to inspire this feeling.[18] Yet the hundred pounds that John Borrow was able to procure must have been a godsend, for shortly before this we find him writing in his diary of the desperation that caused him to sell his books. 'Books that had cost me £20 I got only £3 for. But it was better than starvation.' Indeed it was in April of this year that the very baker was 'insolent,' and so in May 1824, as we learn from Tom Taylor's Life, he produced 'a full-length portrait of Mr. Hawkes, a late Mayor of Norwich, painted for St. Andrew's Hall in that city.' But I must leave Haydon's troubled career, which closes so far as the two brothers are concerned with a letter from George to Haydon written the following year from 26 Bryanston Street, Portman Square:

George Borrow.[19]
[Pg 26]

As Borrow was at the time in a most impoverished condition, it is not easy to believe that he would have wished to be taken at his word. He certainly had not a thousand pounds to lose. But he did undoubtedly, as we shall see, take that journey on foot through the south of France, after the manner of an earlier vagabond of literature—Oliver Goldsmith. Haydon was to be far too much taken up with his own troubles during the coming months to think any more about the Borrows when he had once completed the portrait of the mayor, which he had done by July of this year. Borrow's letter to him is, however, an obvious outcome of a remark dropped by the painter on the occasion of his one visit to his studio when the following conversation took place:

[Pg 27]

We wish that the acquaintance had extended further, but this was not to be. Borrow was soon to commence the wanderings which were to give him much unsatisfactory fame, and the pair never met again. Let us, however, return to John Borrow, who accompanied Haydon to Norwich, leaving his brother for some time longer to the tender mercies of Sir Richard Phillips. John, we judge, seems to have had plenty of shrewdness, and was not without a sense of his own limitations. A chance came to him of commercial success in a distant land, and he seized that chance. A Norwich friend, Allday Kerrison, had gone out to Mexico, and writing from Zacatecas in 1825 asked John to join him. John accepted. His salary in the service of the Real del Monte Company was to be £300 per annum. He sailed for Mexico in 1826, having obtained from his Colonel, Lord Orford, leave of absence for a year, it being understood that renewals of that leave of absence might be granted. He was entitled to half-pay as a Lieutenant of the West Norfolk Militia, and this he settled upon his mother during his absence. His career in Mexico was a failure. There are many of his letters to his mother and brother extant which tell of the difficulties of his situation. He was in three Mexican companies in succession, and was about to be sent to Columbia to take charge of a mine when he was stricken with a fever, and died at Guanajuato on 22nd November 1838. He had far exceeded any leave that his Colonel could in fairness grant, and before his death his name had been taken off the army rolls. The question of his pay produced a long correspondence, which can be found in the archives of the Rolls Office. I have the original drafts of these letters in Borrow's handwriting.[Pg 28] The first letter by Borrow is dated 8th September 1831; it is better to give the correspondence in its order.[20] The letters speak for themselves, and require no comment.

I

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, September 8, 1831.

George Borrow.

II

To the Right Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, 17th Septr. 1831.

George Borrow.

III

To the Right Hon. The Secretary at War

Norwich, Novr. 24, 1831.

George Borrow.

IV

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Norwich, Decr. 13, 1831.

George Borrow.

[Pg 32]

V

To the Rt. Hon. The Secretary at War

Willow Lane, Norwich, May 24, 1833.

George Borrow.

[Pg 32a]

GEORGE BORROW

From a portrait by his brother John Thomas Borrow taken in early youth when his hair was black. This portrait is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

[Pg 33]

The last of these letters is in another handwriting than that of Borrow, who by this time had started for St. Petersburg for the Bible Society. The officials were adamant. To one letter the War Office replied that they could not consider any claims until Lieutenant Borrow of the West Norfolk Militia should have arrived in England to attend the training of his regiment. These five letters are, as we have said, in the Rolls Office, although the indefatigable Professor Knapp seems to have dropped across only two of them there. Their chief interest is in that they are the earliest in order of date of the hitherto known letters of Borrow. There is one further letter on the subject written somewhat later by old Mrs. Borrow. She also appeals to the War Office for her son's allowance.[22] It would seem clear that the arrears were never paid.

To the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Orford

Willow Lane, Norwich, 26 May 1834.

Ann Borrow.

I have said that there are letters of John Borrow's extant. Fragments of these will be found in Dr. Knapp's book. These show a keen intelligence, great practicality, and common sense. George—in 1829—had asked his brother as to joining him in Mexico. 'If the country is soon settled I shall say "yes,"' John answers. With equal wisdom he says to his brother, 'Do not enter the army; it is a bad spec.' In this same year, 1829, John writes to ask whether his mother and brother are 'still living in that windy house of old King's; it gives me the rheumatism to think of it.' In 1830 he writes to his mother that he wishes his brother were making money. 'Neither he nor I have any luck, he works hard and remains poor.' In February of 1831 John writes to George suggesting that he should endeavour to procure a commission in the regiment, and in July of the same year to try the law again:

John, as we have seen, died in Mexico of fever. George was at St. Petersburg working for the Bible Society when his mother writes from Norwich to tell him the news. John had died on 22nd November 1833. 'You are now my only hope,' she writes, ' ... do not grieve, my dear George. I trust we shall all meet in heaven. Put a crape on your hat for[Pg 35] some time.' Had George Borrow's brother lived it might have meant very much in his life. There might have been nephews and nieces to soften the asperity of his later years. Who can say? Meanwhile, Lavengro contains no happier pages than those concerned with this dearly loved brother.

GEORGE BORROW'S BIRTHPLACE AT DUMPLING GREEN

From a drawing by Fortunino Matania

[Pg 36]

CHAPTER IV

A WANDERING CHILDHOOD

We do not need to inquire too deeply as to Borrow's possible gypsy origin in order to account for his vagabond propensities. The lives of his parents before his birth, and the story of his own boyhood, sufficiently account for the dominant tendency in Borrow. His father and mother were married in 1793. Almost every year they changed their domicile. In 1801 a son was born to them—they still continued to change their domicile. Captain Borrow followed his regiment from place to place, and his family accompanied him on these journeys. Dover, Colchester, Sandgate, Canterbury, Chelmsford—these are some of the towns where the Borrows sojourned. It was the merest accident—the Peace of Amiens, to be explicit—that led them back to East Dereham in 1803, so that the second son was born in his grandfather's house. George was only a month old when he was carried off to Colchester; in 1804 he was in the barracks of Kent, in 1805 of Sussex, in 1806 at Hastings, in 1807 at Canterbury, and so on. The indefatigable Dr. Knapp has recorded every detail for all who love the minute, the meticulous, in biography. The whole of the first thirteen years of Borrow's life is filled up in this way, until in 1816 he and his parents found a home of some permanence in Norwich. In 1809-10 they were at East[Pg 37] Dereham, in 1810-11 at Norman Cross, in 1812 wandering from Harwich to Sheffield, and in 1813 wandering from Sheffield to Edinburgh; in 1814 they were in Norwich, and in 1815-16 in Ireland. In this last year they returned to Norwich, the father to retire on full pay, and to live in Willow Lane until his death. How could a boy, whose first twelve years of life had been made up of such continual wandering, have been other than a restless, nomad-loving man, envious of the free life of the gypsies, for whom alone in later life he seemed to have kindliness? Those twelve years are to most boys merely the making of a moral foundation for good or ill; to Borrow they were everything, and at least four personalities captured his imagination during that short span, as we see if we follow his juvenile wanderings more in detail to Dereham, Norman Cross, Edinburgh, and Clonmel, and the personalities are Lady Fenn, Ambrose Smith, David Haggart, and Murtagh. Let us deal with each in turn:

A. East Dereham and Lady Fenn.—In our opening chapter we referred to the lines in Lavengro, where Borrow recalls his early impressions of his native town, or at least the town in the neighbourhood of the hamlet in which he was born. Borrow, we may be sure, would have repudiated 'Dumpling Green' if he could. The name had a humorous suggestion. To this day they call boys from Norfolk 'Norfolk Dumplings' in the neighbouring shires. But East Dereham was something to be proud of. In it had died the writer who, through the greater part of Borrow's life, remained the favourite poet of that half of England which professed the Evangelical creed in which Borrow was brought up. Cowper was buried here by the side of[Pg 38] Mary Unwin, and every Sunday little George would see his tomb just as Henry Kingsley was wont to see the tombs in Chelsea Old Church. The fervour of devotion to Cowper's memory that obtained in those early days must have been a stimulus to the boy, who from the first had ambitions far beyond anything that he was to achieve. Here was his first lesson. The second came from Lady Fenn—a more vivid impression for the child. Twenty years before Borrow was born Cowper had sung her merits in his verse. She and her golden-headed cane are commemorated in Lavengro. Dame Eleanor Fenn had made a reputation in her time. As 'Mrs. Teachwell' and 'Mrs. Lovechild' she had published books for the young of a most improving character, The Child's Grammar, The Mother's Grammar, A Short History of Insects, and Cobwebs to Catch Flies being of the number. The forty-fourth edition of The Child's Grammar by Mrs. Lovechild appeared in 1851, and the twenty-second edition of The Mother's Grammar in 1849. But it is her husband that her name most recalls to us. Sir John Fenn gave us the delightful Paston Letters—of which Horace Walpole said that 'they make all other letters not worth reading.' Walpole described 'Mr. Fenn of East Dereham in Norfolk' as 'a smatterer in antiquity, but a very good sort of man.' Fenn, who held the original documents of the Letters, sent his first two volumes, when published, to Buckingham Palace, and the King acknowledged the gifts by knighting the editor, who, however, died in 1794, before George Borrow was born. His widow survived until 1813, and Borrow was in his seventh or eighth year when he caught these notable glimpses of his 'Lady Bountiful,' who lived in 'the half-aristocratic mansion' of the[Pg 39] town. But we know next to nothing of Borrow in East Dereham, from which indeed he departed in his eighth year. There are, however, interesting references to his memories of the place in Lavengro. The first is where he recalls to his author friend, who had offered him comet wine of 1811, his recollection of gazing at the comet from the market-place of 'pretty D——' in 1811.[23] The second reference is when he goes to church with the gypsies and dreams of an incident in his childhood:

But Borrow, as I have said, left Dereham in his eighth year, and the author of a History of East Dereham[Pg 40] thus accounts for several inaccuracies in his memory, both as to persons and things.

B. Norman Cross and Ambrose Smith.—In Lavengro Borrow recalls childish memories of Canterbury and of Hythe, at which latter place he saw the church vault filled with ancient skulls as we may see it there to-day. And after that the book which impressed itself most vividly upon his memory was Robinson Crusoe. How much he came to revere Defoe the pages of Lavengro most eloquently reveal to us. 'Hail to thee, spirit of Defoe! What does not my own poor self owe to thee?' In 1810-11 his father was in the barracks at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire. Here the Government had bought a large tract of land, and built upon it a huge wooden prison, and overlooking this a substantial barrack also of wood, the only brick building on the land being the house of the Commandant. The great building was destined for the soldiers taken prisoners in the French wars. The place was constructed to hold 5000 prisoners, and 500 men were employed by the War Office in 1808 upon its construction. The first batch of prisoners were the victims of the battle of Vimeiro in that year. Borrow's description of the hardships of the prisoners has been called in question by a later writer, Arthur Brown,[24] who denies the story of bad food and 'straw-plait hunts,' and charges Borrow with recklessness of statement. 'What could have been the matter with the man to write such stuff as this?' asks[Pg 41] Brown in reference to Borrow's story of bad meat and bad bread: which was not treating a great author with quite sufficient reverence. Borrow was but recalling memories of childhood, a period when one swallow does make a summer. He had doubtless seen examples of what he described, although it may not have been the normal condition of things. Brown's own description of the Norman Cross prison was interwoven with a love romance, in which a French officer fell in love with a girl of the neighbouring village of Yaxley, and after Waterloo returned to England and married her. When he wrote his story a very old man was still living at Yaxley, who remembered, as a boy, having often seen the prisoners on the road, some very well dressed, some in tatters, a few in uniform. The milestone is still pointed out which marked the limit beyond which the officer-prisoners might not walk. The buildings were destroyed in 1814, when all the prisoners were sent home, and the house of the Commandant, now a private residence, alone remains to recall this episode in our history. But Borrow's most vivid memory of Norman Cross was connected with the viper given to him by an old man, who had rendered it harmless by removing the fangs. It was the possession of this tame viper that enabled the child of eight—this was Borrow's age at the time—to impress the gypsies that he met soon afterwards, and particularly the boy Ambrose Smith, whom Borrow introduced to the world in Lavengro as Jasper Petulengro. Borrow's frequent meetings with Petulengro[25] are no doubt many of them mythical. He was an imaginative writer, and Dr. Knapp's worst banality is to suggest that he 'invented nothing.' But[Pg 42] Petulengro was a very real person, who lived the usual roving gypsy life. There is no reason to assume otherwise than that Borrow did actually meet him at Norman Cross when he was eight years old, and Ambrose a year younger, and not thirteen as Borrow states. In the original manuscript of Lavengro in my possession, as in the copy of it in Mrs. Borrow's handwriting that came into the possession of Dr. Knapp, 'Ambrose' is given instead of 'Jasper,' and the name was altered as an afterthought. It is of course possible that Borrow did not actually meet Jasper until his arrival in Norwich, for in the first half of the nineteenth century various gypsy families were in the habit of assembling their carts and staking their tents on the heights above Norwich, known as Mousehold Heath, that glorious tract of country that has been rendered memorable in history by the tragic life of Kett the tanner, and has been immortalised in painting by Turner and Crome. Here were assembled the Smiths and Hernes and Boswells, names familiar to every student of gypsy lore. Jasper Petulengro, as Borrow calls him, or Ambrose Smith, to give him his real name, was the son of Fāden Smith, and his name of Ambrose was derived from his uncle, Ambrose Smith, who was transported for stealing harness. Ambrose was twice married, and it was his second wife, Sanspirella Herne, who comes into the Borrow story. He had families by both his wives. Ambrose had an extraordinary varied career. It will be remembered by readers of the Zincali that when he visited Borrow at Oulton in 1842 he complained that 'There is no living for the poor people, brother, the chokengres (police) pursue us from place to place, and the gorgios are become either so poor or miserly that they grudge our cattle a bite of grass by the wayside, and ourselves a yard of[Pg 43] ground to light a fire upon.' After a time Ambrose left the eastern counties and crossed to Ireland. In 1868 he went to Scotland, and there seems to have revived his fortunes. In 1878 he and his family were encamped at Knockenhair Park, about a mile from Dunbar. Here Queen Victoria, who was staying at Broxmouth Park near by with the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe, became interested in the gypsies, and paid them a visit.[26] This was in the summer of 1878. Ambrose was then a very old man. He died in the following October. His wife, Sanspi or Sanspirella, received a message of sympathy from the Queen. Very shortly after Ambrose's death, however, most of the family went off to America, where doubtless they are now scattered, many of them, it may be, leading successful lives, utterly oblivious of the association of one of their ancestors with Borrow and his great book. Ambrose Smith was buried in Dunbar cemetery, the Christian service being read over his grave, and his friends erected[Pg 44] a stone to him which bears the following inscription, the hymn not being very accurately rendered:

In December 1912 a London newspaper contained an account of a gypsy meeting at which Jasper Petulengro was present. Not only was this obviously impossible, but no relative of Ambrose Smith is apparently alive in England who could by any chance have justified the imposition.

I have said that it is probable that Borrow did not meet Jasper or Ambrose until later days in Norwich. I assume this as possible because Borrow misstates the age of his boy friend in Lavengro. Ambrose was actually a year younger than Borrow, whereas when George was eight years of age he represents Ambrose as 'a lad of some twelve or thirteen years,' and he[Pg 45] keeps up this illusion on more than one later occasion. However, we may take it as almost certain that Borrow received his first impression of the gypsies in these early days at Norman Cross.

C. Edinburgh and David Haggart.—Three years separated the sojourn of the Borrow family at Norman Cross from their sojourn in Edinburgh—three years of continuous wandering. The West Norfolk Militia were watching the French prisoners at Norman Cross for fifteen months. After that we have glimpses of them at Colchester, at East Dereham again, at Harwich, at Leicester, at Huddersfield, concerning which place Borrow incidentally in Wild Wales writes of having been at school, in Sheffield, in Berwick-on-Tweed, and finally the family are in Edinburgh, where they arrive on 6th April 1813. We have already referred to Borrow's presence at the High School of Edinburgh, the school sanctified by association with Walter Scott and so many of his illustrious fellow-countrymen. He and his brother were at the High School for a single session, that is, for the winter session of 1813-14, although with the licence of a maker of fiction he claimed, in Lavengro, to have been there for two years. But it is not in this brief period of schooling of a boy of ten that we find the strongest influence that Edinburgh gave to Borrow. Rather may we seek it in the acquaintanceship with the once too notorious David Haggart. Seven years later than this all the peoples of the three kingdoms were discussing David Haggart, the Scots Jack Sheppard, the clever young prison-breaker, who was hanged at Edinburgh in 1821 for killing his jailer in Dumfries prison. How much David Haggart filled the imagination of every one who could read in the early years of last[Pg 46] century is demonstrated by a reference to the Library Catalogue of the British Museum, where we find pamphlet after pamphlet, broadsheet after broadsheet, treating of the adventures, trial, and execution of this youthful jailbird. Even George Combe, the phrenologist, most famous in his day, sat in judgment upon the young man while he was in prison, and published a pamphlet which made a great impression upon prison reformers. Combe submitted his observations to Haggart in jail, and told the prisoner indeed that he had a greater development of the organs of benevolence and justice than he had anticipated. There cannot be a doubt but that Combe started in a measure, through his treatment of this case, the theory that many of our methods of punishment led to the making of habitual criminals.[28] But by far the most valuable publication with regard to Haggart is one that Borrow must have read in his youth. This was a life of Haggart written by himself,[29] a little book that had a[Pg 47] wide circulation, and containing a preface by George Robertson, Writer to the Signet, dated Edinburgh, 20th July 1821. Mr. Robertson tells us that a portion of the story was written by Haggart, and the remainder taken down from his dictation. The profits of this book, Haggart arranged, were to go in part to the school of the jail in which he was confined, and part to be devoted to the welfare of his younger brothers and sister. From this little biography we learn that Haggart was born in Golden Acre, near Canon-Mills, in the county of Edinburgh in 1801, his father, John Haggart, being a gamekeeper, and in later years a dog-trainer. The boy was at school under Mr. Robin Gibson at Canon-Mills for two years. He left school at ten years of age, and from that time until his execution seems to have had a continuous career of thieving. He tells us that before he was eleven years old he had stolen a bantam cock from a woman belonging to the New Town of Edinburgh. He went with another boy to Currie, six miles from Edinburgh, and there stole a pony, but this was afterwards returned. When but twelve years of age he attended Leith races, and it was here that he enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, then stationed in Edinburgh Castle. This may very well have brought him into contact with Borrow in the way described in Lavengro. He was only, however, in the regiment for a year, for when it was sent back to England the Colonel in command of it obtained young Haggart's discharge. These dates coincide with Borrow's presence in Edinburgh. Haggart's history for the next five or six years was in truth merely that of a wandering pickpocket, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in England, and finally he became a notorious burglar. Incidentally he refers to a girl[Pg 48] with whom he was in love. Her name was Mary Hill She belonged to Ecclefechan, which Haggart more than once visited. He must therefore have known Carlyle, who had not then left his native village. In 1820 we find him in Edinburgh, carrying on the same sort of depredations both there and at Leith—now he steals a silk plaid, now a greatcoat, and now a silver teapot. These thefts, of course, landed him in jail, out of which he breaks rather dramatically, fleeing with a companion to Kelso. He had, indeed, more than one experience of jail. Finally, we find him in the prison of Dumfries destined to stand his trial for 'one act of house-breaking, eleven cases of theft, and one of prison-breaking.' While in prison at Dumfries he planned another escape, and in the attempt to hit a jailer named Morrin on the head with a stone he unexpectedly killed him. His escape from Dumfries jail after this murder, and his later wanderings, are the most dramatic part of his book. He fled through Carlisle to Newcastle, and then thought that he would be safer if he returned to Scotland, where he found the rewards that were offered for his arrest faced him wherever he went. He turned up again in Edinburgh, where he seems to have gone about freely, although reading everywhere the notices that a reward of seventy guineas was offered for his apprehension. Then he fled to Ireland, where he thought that his safety was assured. At Dromore he was arrested and brought before the magistrate, but he spoke with an Irish brogue, and declared that his name was John McColgan, and that he came from Armagh. He escaped from Dromore jail by jumping through a window, and actually went so far as to pay three pound ten shillings for his passage to America, but he was afraid of the sea, and changed his mind, and lost his[Pg 49] passage money at the last moment. After this he made a tour right through Ireland, in spite of the fact that the Dublin Hue and Cry had a description of his person which he read more than once. His assurance was such that in Tullamore he made a pig-driver apologise before the magistrate for charging him with theft, although he had been living on nothing else all the time he was in Ireland. Finally, he was captured, being recognised by a policeman from Edinburgh. He was brought from Ireland to Dumfries, landed in Calton jail, Edinburgh, and was tried and executed. In addition to composing this biography Haggart wrote while in Edinburgh jail a rather long set of verses, of which I give the following two as specimens (the original autograph is in Lord Cockburn's copy in the British Museum):

D. Ireland and Murtagh.—We may pass over the brief sojourn in Norwich that was Borrow's lot in 1814, when the West Norfolk Militia left Scotland. When Napoleon escaped from Elba the West Norfolk Regiment was despatched to Ireland, and Captain Borrow again took his family with him. We find the boy with his family at Clonmel from May to December of 1815. Here Borrow's elder brother, now a boy of fifteen, was promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant, gaining in a year, as Dr. Knapp reminds us, a position that it[Pg 50] had taken his father twelve years to attain. In January 1816 the Borrows moved to Templemore, returning to England in May of that year. Borrow, we see, was less than a year in Ireland, and he was only thirteen years of age when he left the country. But it seems to have been the greatest influence that guided his career. Three of the most fascinating chapters in Lavengro were one outcome of that brief sojourn, a thirst for the acquirement of languages was another, and perhaps a taste for romancing a third. Borrow never came to have the least sympathy with the Irish race, or its national aspirations. As the son of a half-educated soldier he did not come in contact with any but the vagabond element of Ireland, exactly as his father had done before him.[30] Captain Borrow was asked on one occasion what language is being spoken:

And Borrow followed his father's prejudices throughout his life, although in the one happy year in which he wrote The Bible in Spain he was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his work:

In later years Orangemen were to him the only attractive element in the life of Ireland, and we may be sure[Pg 51] that he was not displeased when his stepdaughter married one of them. Yet the creator of literature works more wisely than he knows, and Borrow's books have won the wise and benign appreciation of many an Irish and Roman Catholic reader, whose nationality and religion Borrow would have anathematised. Irishmen may forgive Borrow much, because he was one of the first of modern English writers to take their language seriously.[32] It is true that he had but the most superficial knowledge of it. He admits—in Wild Wales—that he only knew it 'by ear.' The abundant Irish literature that has been so diligently studied during the last quarter of a century was a closed book to Borrow, whose few translations from the Irish have but little value. Yet the very appreciation of Irish as a language to be seriously studied in days before Dr. Sigerson, Dr. Douglas Hyde, and Dr. Kuno Meyer had waxed enthusiastic and practical kindles our gratitude. Then what a character is Murtagh. We are sure there was a Murtagh, although, unlike Borrow's other boyish and vagabond friend Haggart, we know nothing about him but what Borrow has to tell. Yet what a picture is this where Murtagh wants a pack of cards:

With what distrust as we learn again and again in Lavengro did Captain Borrow follow his son's inclination towards languages, and especially the Irish language, in his early years, although seeing that he was well grounded in Latin. Little did the worthy Captain dream that this, and this alone, was to carry down his name through the ages:

Borrow was never a philologist, but this first inclination was to lead him to Spanish, to Welsh, and above all to Romany, and to make of him the most beloved traveller and the strangest vagabond in all English literature.

[Pg 54]

CHAPTER V

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH—THE GURNEYS

Norwich may claim to be one of the most fascinating cities in the kingdom. To-day it is known to the wide world by its canaries and its mustard, although its most important industry is the boot trade, in which it employs some eight thousand persons. To the visitor it has many attractions. The lovely cathedral with its fine Norman arches, the Erpingham Gate so splendidly Gothic, the noble Castle Keep so imposingly placed with the cattle-market below—these are all as Borrow saw them nearly a century ago. So also is the church of St. Peter Mancroft, where Sir Thomas Browne lies buried. And to the picturesque Mousehold Heath you may still climb and recall one of the first struggles for liberty and progress that past ages have seen, the Norfolk rising under Robert Kett which has only not been glorified in song and in picture, because—

And Kett's so-called rebellion was destined to failure, and its leader to cruel martyrdom. Mousehold Heath has been made the subject of paintings by Turner and Crome, and of fine word pictures by George Borrow. When Borrow and his parents lighted upon Norwich[Pg 55] in 1814 and 1816 the city had inspiring literary associations. Before the invention of railways it seemed not uncommon for a fine intellectual life to emanate from this or that cathedral city. Such an intellectual life was associated with Lichfield when the Darwins and the Edgeworths gathered at the Bishop's Palace around Dr. Seward and his accomplished daughters. Norwich has more than once been such a centre. The first occasion was in the period of which we write, when the Taylors and the Gurneys flourished in a region of ideas; the second was during the years from 1837 to 1849, when Edward Stanley held the bishopric. This later period does not come into our story, as by that time Borrow had all but left Norwich. But of the earlier period, the period of Borrow's more or less fitful residence in Norwich—1814 to 1833—we are tempted to write at some length. There were three separate literary and social forces in Norwich in the first decades of the nineteenth century—the Gurneys of Earlham, the Taylor-Austin group, and William Taylor, who was in no way related to Mrs. John Taylor and her daughter, Sarah Austin. The Gurneys were truly a remarkable family, destined to leave their impress upon Norwich and upon a wider world. At the time of his marriage in 1773 to Catherine Bell, John Gurney, wool-stapler of Norwich, took his young wife, whose face has been preserved in a canvas by Gainsborough, to live in the old Court House in Magdalen Street, which had been the home of two generations of the Gurney family. In 1786 John Gurney went with his continually growing family to live at Earlham Hall, some two or three miles out of Norwich on the Earlham Road. Here that family of eleven children—one boy had died in infancy—grew[Pg 56] up. Not one but has an interesting history, which is recorded by Mr. Augustus Hare and other writers.[34] Elizabeth, the fourth daughter, married Joseph Fry, and as Elizabeth Fry attained to a world-wide fame as a prison reformer. Hannah married Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton of Slave Trade Abolition; Richenda, the Rev. Francis Cunningham, who sent George Borrow upon his career; while Louisa married Samuel Hoare of Hampstead. Of her Joseph John Gurney said at her death in 1836 that she was 'superior in point of talent to any other of my father's eleven children.' It is with the eleventh child, however, that we have mainly to do, for this son, Joseph John Gurney, alone appears in Borrow's pages. The picture of these eleven Quaker children growing up to their various destinies under the roof of Earlham Hall is an attractive one. Men and women of all creeds accepted the catholic Quaker's hospitality. Mrs. Opie and a long list of worthies of the past come before us, and when Mr. Gurney, in 1802, took his six unmarried daughters to the Lakes Old Crome accompanied them as drawing-master. There is, however, one picture in the story of unforgettable charm, the episode of the courtship of Elizabeth Gurney by Joseph Fry, and this I must quote from Mr. Augustus Hare's pleasant book:

In 1803—the year of Borrow's birth—John Gurney became a partner in the great London Bank of Overend and Gurney, and his son, Joseph John, in that same year went up to Oxford. In 1809 Joseph returned to take his place in the bank, and to preside over the family of unmarried sisters at Earlham, father and mother being dead, and many members of the family distributed. Incidentally, we are told by Mr. Hare that the Gurneys of Earlham at this time drove out with four black horses, and that when Bishop Bathurst, Stanley's predecessor, required horses for State occasions to drive him to the cathedral, he borrowed these, and the more modest episcopal horses took the Quaker family to their meeting-house. It does not come within the scope of this book, discursive as I choose to[Pg 58] make it, to trace the fortunes of these eleven remarkable Gurney children, or even of Borrow's momentary acquaintance, Joseph John Gurney. His residence at Earlham, and his life of philanthropy, are a romance in a way, although one wonders whether if the name of Gurney had not been associated with so much of virtue and goodness the crash that came long after Joseph John Gurney's death would have been quite so full of affliction for a vast multitude. Joseph John Gurney died in 1847, in his fifty-ninth year; his sister, Mrs. Fry, had died two years earlier. The younger brother and twelfth child—Joseph John being the eleventh—Daniel Gurney, the last of the twelve children, lived till 1880, aged eighty-nine. He had outlived by many years the catastrophe to the great banking firm with which the name of Gurney is associated. This great firm of Overend and Gurney, of which yet another brother, Samuel, was the moving spirit, was organised nine years after his death—in 1865—into a joint-stock company, which failed to the amount of eleven millions in 1866. At the time of the failure, which affected all England, much as did the Liberator smash a generation later, the only Gurney in the directorate was Daniel Gurney, to whom his sister, Lady Buxton, allowed a pension of £2000 a year. This is a long story to tell by way of introduction to one episode in Lavengro. Dr. Knapp places this episode in the year 1817, when Borrow was but fourteen years of age and Gurney was twenty-nine. I need not apologise at this point for a very lengthy quotation from a familiar book:

It is doubtful if Borrow met Joseph John Gurney more than on the one further occasion to which he refers above. At the commencement of his engagement with the Bible Society he writes to its secretary, Mr. Jowett (March 18, 1833), to say that he must procure from Mr. Cunningham 'a letter of introduction from him to John Gurney,' and this second and last interview must have taken place at Earlham before his departure for Russia.

But if Borrow was to come very little under the influence of Joseph John Gurney, his destiny was to be considerably moulded by the action of Gurney's brother-in-law, Cunningham, who first put him in touch with the Bible Society. Joseph John Gurney and his sisters were the very life of the Bible Society in those years.

[Pg 63]

CHAPTER VI

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH—THE TAYLORS

With the famous 'Taylors of Norwich' Borrow seems to have had no acquaintance, although he went to school with a connection of that family, James Martineau. These socially important Taylors were in no way related to William Taylor of that city, who knew German literature, and scandalised the more virtuous citizens by that, and perhaps more by his fondness for wine and also for good English beer—a drink over which his friend Borrow was to become lyrical. When people speak of the Norwich Taylors they refer to the family of Dr. John Taylor, who in 1783 was elected to the charge of the Presbyterian congregation in Norwich. His eldest son, Richard, married Margaret, the daughter of a mayor of Norwich of the name of Meadows; and Sarah, another daughter of that same worshipful mayor, married David Martineau, grandson of Gaston Martineau, who fled from France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.[35] Harriet and James Martineau were grandchildren of this David. The second son of Richard and Margaret Taylor was John, who married Susannah Cook. Susannah is the clever Mrs. John Taylor of this story, and her daughter of even greater ability was Sarah Austin, the wife of the[Pg 64] famous jurist. Their daughter married Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon. She was the author of Letters from Egypt, a book to which George Meredith wrote an 'Introduction,' so much did he love the writer. Lady Duff-Gordon's daughter, Janet Ross, wrote the biography of her mother, her grandmother, and Mrs. John Taylor, in Three Generations of Englishwomen. A niece, Lena Duff-Gordon (Mrs. Waterfield), has written pleasant books of travel, and so, for five generations, this family has produced clever women-folk. But here we are only concerned with Mrs. John Taylor, called by her friends the 'Madame Roland of Norwich.' Lucy Aikin describes how she 'darned her boy's grey worsted stockings while holding her own with Southey, Brougham, or Mackintosh.' One of her daughters married Henry Reeve, and, as I have said, another married John Austin. Borrow was twenty years of age and living in Norwich when Mrs. Taylor died. It is to be regretted that in the early impressionable years his position as a lawyer's clerk did not allow of his coming into a circle in which he might have gained certain qualities of savoir faire and joie de vivre, which he was all his days to lack. Of the Taylor family the Duke of Sussex said that they reversed the ordinary saying that it takes nine tailors to make a man. The witticism has been attributed to Sydney Smith, but Mrs. Ross gives evidence that it was the Duke's—the youngest son of George III. In his Life of Sir James Mackintosh Basil Montagu, referring to Mrs. John Taylor, says:

We note here the reference to 'the high-minded and intelligent William Taylor,' because William Taylor, whose influence upon Borrow's destiny was so pronounced, has been revealed to many by the slanders of Harriet Martineau, that extraordinary compound of meanness and generosity, of poverty-stricken intelligence and rich endowment. In her Autobiography, published in 1877, thirty-four years after Robberds's Memoir of William Taylor, she dwells upon the drinking propensities of William Taylor, who was a schoolfellow of her father's. She admits, indeed, that Taylor was an ideal son, whose 'exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city,' and she continues:

Well, Harriet Martineau is not much to be trusted as to Taylor's virtues or his vices, for her early recollections are frequently far from the mark. Thus she refers under the date 1833 to the fact that:

As a matter of fact, in this year, 1833, Mrs. Fry was[Pg 66] the mother of fifteen children, and had nine grandchildren, and Joseph John Gurney had been twice a widower. Both brother and sister were zealous philanthropists at this date. And so we may take with some measure of qualification Harriet Martineau's many strictures upon Taylor's drinking habits, which were, no doubt, those of his century and epoch; although perhaps beyond the acceptable standard of Norwich, where the Gurneys were strong teetotallers, and the Bishop once invited Father Mathew, then in the glory of his temperance crusade, to discourse in his diocese. Indeed, Robberds, his biographer, tells us explicitly that these charges of intemperance were 'grossly and unjustly exaggerated.' William Taylor's life is pleasantly interlinked with Scott and Southey. Lucy Aikin records that she heard Sir Walter Scott declare to Mrs. Barbauld that Taylor had laid the foundations of his literary career—had started him upon the path of glory through romantic verse to romantic prose, from The Lay of the Last Minstrel to Waverley. It was the reading of Taylor's translation of Bürger's Lenore that did all this. 'This, madam,' said Scott, 'was what made me a poet. I had several times attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without success, but here was something that I thought I could do.' Southey assuredly loved Taylor, and each threw at the feet of the other the abundant literary learning that both possessed. This we find in a correspondence which, reading more than a century after it was written, still has its charm.[36] The son of a[Pg 67] wealthy manufacturer of Norwich, Taylor was born in that city in 1765. He was in early years a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld. At fourteen he was placed in his father's counting-house, and soon afterwards was sent abroad, in the company of one of the partners, to acquire languages. He learnt German thoroughly at a time when few Englishmen had acquaintance with its literature. To Goethe's genius he never did justice, having been offended by that great man's failure to acknowledge a book that Taylor sent to him, exactly as Carlyle and Borrow alike were afterwards offended by similar delinquencies on the part of Walter Scott. When he settled again in Norwich he commenced to write for the magazines, among others for Sir Richard Phillips's Monthly Magazine, and to correspond with Southey. At the time Southey was a poor man, thinking of abandoning literature for the law, and hopeful of practising in Calcutta. The Norwich Liberals, however, aspired to a newspaper to be called The Iris. Taylor asked Southey to come to Norwich and to become its editor. Southey declined and Taylor took up the task. The Norwich Iris lasted for two years. Southey never threw over his friendship for Taylor, although their views ultimately came to be far apart. Writing to Taylor in 1803 he says:

[Pg 68]

But the correspondence went on apace, indeed it occupies the larger part of Robberds's two substantial volumes. It is in the very last letter from Taylor to Southey that we find an oft-quoted reference to Borrow. The letter is dated 12th March 1821:

Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor's three volumes of the Historic Survey of German Poetry appeared in 1828, 1829, and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote from Abbotsford on 23rd April 1832 to Taylor to protest against an allusion to 'William Scott of Edinburgh' being the author of a translation of Goetz von Berlichingen. Scott explained that he (Walter Scott) was that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had borrowed with acknowledgment two lines from Taylor's Lenore for his own—

adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name 'William' was actually on the title-page of the London edition of 1799 of Goetz von Berlichingen. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he wrote:[Pg 69]

Taylor's many books are now all forgotten. His translation of Bürger's Lenore one now only recalls by its effect upon Scott; his translation of Lessing's Nathan the Wise has been superseded. His voluminous Historic Survey of German Poetry only lives through Carlyle's severe review in the Edinburgh Review[37] against the many strictures in which Taylor's biographer attempts to defend him. Taylor had none of Carlyle's inspiration. Not a line of his work survives in print in our day, but it was no small thing to have been the friend and correspondent of Southey, whose figure in literary history looms larger now than it did when Emerson asked contemptuously, 'Who's Southey?'; and to have been the wise mentor of George Borrow is in itself to be no small thing in the record of letters. There is a considerable correspondence between Taylor and Sir Richard Phillips in Robberds's Memoir, and Phillips seemed always anxious to secure articles from Taylor for the Monthly, and even books for his publishing-house. Hence the introduction from Taylor that Borrow carried to London might have been most effective if Phillips had had any use for poor and impracticable would-be authors.

[Pg 70]

CHAPTER VII

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH—THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL

When George Borrow first entered Norwich after the long journey from Edinburgh, Joseph John Gurney, born 1788, was twenty-six years of age, and William Taylor, born 1765, was forty-nine. Borrow was eleven years of age. Captain Borrow took temporary lodgings at the Crown and Angel Inn in St. Stephen's Street, George was sent to the Grammar School, and his elder brother started to learn drawing and painting with John Crome ('Old Crome') of many a fine landscape. But the wanderings of the family were not yet over. Napoleon escaped from Elba, and the West Norfolk Militia were again put on the march. This time it was Ireland to which they were destined, and we have already shadowed forth, with the help of Lavengro, that momentous episode. The victory of Waterloo gave Europe peace, and in 1816 the Borrow family returned to Norwich, there to pass many quiet years. In 1819 Captain Borrow was pensioned—eight shillings a day. From 1816 till his father's death in 1824 Borrow lived in Norwich with his family. Their home was in King's Court, Willow Lane, a modest one-storey house in a cul de sac, which we have already described. In King's Court, Willow Lane, Borrow lived at intervals until his marriage in 1840, and his[Pg 71] mother continued to live in the house until, in 1849, she agreed to join her son and daughter-in-law at Oulton. Yet the house comes little into the story of Borrow's life, as do the early houses of many great men of letters, nor do subsequent houses come into his story; the house at Oulton and the house at Hereford Square are equally barren of association; the broad highway and the windy heath were Borrow's natural home. He was never a 'civilised' being; he never shone in drawing-rooms. Let us, however, return to Borrow's schooldays, of which the records are all too scanty, and not in the least invigorating. The Norwich Grammar School has an interesting tradition. We pass to the cathedral through the beautiful Erpingham Gate built about 1420 by Sir Thomas Erpingham, and we find the school on the left. It was originally a chapel, and the porch is at least five hundred years old. The schoolroom is sufficiently old-world-looking for us to imagine the schoolboys of past generations sitting at the various desks. The school was founded in 1547, but the registers have been lost, and so we know little of its famous pupils of earlier days. Lord Nelson and Rajah Brooke are the two names of men of action that stand out most honourably in modern times among the scholars[38]. In literature Borrow had but one schoolfellow, who afterwards came to distinction—James Martineau. Borrow's headmaster was the Reverend Edward Valpy, who held the office from 1810 to 1829, and to whom is credited the destruction of the school[Pg 72] archives. Borrow's two years of the Grammar School were not happy ones. Borrow, as we have shown, was not of the stuff of which happy schoolboys are made. He had been a wanderer—Scotland, Ireland, and many parts of England had assisted in a fragmentary education; he was now thirteen years of age, and already a vagabond at heart. But let us hear Dr. Augustus Jessopp, who was headmaster of the same Grammar School from 1859 to 1879. Writing of a meeting of old Norvicensians to greet the Rajah, Sir James Brooke, in 1858, when there was a great 'whip' of the 'old boys,' Dr. Jessopp tells us that Borrow, then living at Yarmouth, did not put in an appearance among his schoolfellows:

[Pg 72a]

THE ERPINGHAM GATE AND THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, NORWICH

We pass through the Erpingham Gate direct to the Cathedral, the Grammar School being on our left. Here it is on our right. Facing the school is a statue of Lord Nelson, who was at school here about 1768-70. Borrow was at school here 1816-18.

[Pg 73]

Yet the only real influence that Borrow carried away from the Grammar School was concerned with foreign languages. He did take to the French master and exiled priest, Thomas d'Eterville, a native of Caen, who had emigrated to Norwich in 1793. D'Eterville taught French, Italian, and apparently, to Borrow, a little Spanish; and Borrow, with his wonderful memory, must have been his favourite pupil. In his edition of Lavengro Dr. Knapp publishes a brief dialogue between master and pupil, which gives us an amusing glimpse of the worthy d'Eterville, whom the boys called 'poor old Detterville.' In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Lavengro he is pleasantly described by his pupil, who adds, with characteristic 'bluff,' that d'Eterville said 'on our arrival at the conclusion of Dante's Hell, "vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher."'

Borrow's biographers have dwelt at length upon one episode of his schooldays—the flogging he received from Valpy for playing truant with three other boys. One, by name John Dalrymple, faltered on the way, the two faithful followers of George in his escapade being two brothers named Theodosius and Francis Purland, whose father kept a chemist's shop in Norwich. The three boys wandered away as far as Acle, eleven miles from Norwich, whence they were ignomimously brought back and birched. John Dalrymple's brother Arthur, son of a distinguished Norwich surgeon, who became Clerk of the Peace at Norwich in 1854, and died in 1868, has left a memorandum concerning Borrow, from which I take the following extract[40]:

James Martineau, afterwards a popular preacher and a distinguished theologian of the Unitarian creed, here comes into the story. He was a contemporary with Borrow at the Norwich Grammar School as already stated, but the two boys had little in common. There was nothing of the vagabond about James Martineau, and concerning Borrow—if on no other subject—he would probably have agreed with his sister Harriet, whose views we shall quote in a later chapter. In Martineau's Memoirs, voluminous and dull, there is only one reference to Borrow;[41] but a correspondent once ventured to approach the eminent divine concerning the rumour as to Martineau's part in the birching of the author of The Bible in Spain, and received the following letter:

35 Gordon Square, London, W.C., December 6, 1895.

James Martineau.[42]

Yet it is amusing to trace the story through various phases. Dr. Martineau's letter was the outcome of his attention being called to a statement made in a letter written by a lady in Hampstead to a friend in Norwich, which runs as follows:

11th Nov. 1893.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who lived next door to Borrow in Hereford Square, Brompton, in the 'sixties, as we shall see later, has a word to say on the point:

James Martineau died in 1900, but the last of Borrow's schoolfellows to die was, I think, Mr. William Edmund Image, a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Suffolk. He resided at Herringswell House, near Mildenhall, where he died in 1903, aged 96 years.

Mr. Valpy of the Norwich Grammar School is scarcely to be blamed that he was not able to make separate rules for a quite abnormal boy. Yet, if he[Pg 78] could have known, Borrow was better employed playing truant and living up to his life-work as a glorified vagabond than in studying in the ordinary school routine. George Borrow belonged to a type of boy—there are many such—who learn much more out of school than in its bounds; and the boy Borrow, picking up brother vagabonds in Tombland Fair, and already beginning, in his own peculiar way, his language craze, was laying the foundations that made Lavengro possible.

[Pg 79]

CHAPTER VIII

GEORGE BORROW'S NORWICH—THE LAWYER'S OFFICE

Doubts were very frequently expressed in Borrow's lifetime as to his having really been articled to a solicitor, but the indefatigable Dr. Knapp set that point at rest by reference to the Record Office. Borrow was articled to Simpson and Rackham of Tuck's Court, St. Giles's, Norwich, 'for the term of five years'—from March 1819 to March 1824—and these five years were spent in and about Norwich, and were full of adventure of a kind with which the law had nothing to do. If Borrow had had the makings of a lawyer he could not have entered the profession under happier auspices. The firm was an old established one even in his day. It had been established in Tuck's Court as Simpson and Rackham, then it became Rackham and Morse, Rackham, Cooke and Rackham, and Rackham and Cooke; finally, Tom Rackham, a famous Norwich man in his day, moved to another office, and the firm of lawyers who occupy the original offices in our day is called Leathes Prior and Sons. Borrow has told us frankly what a poor lawyer's clerk he made—he was always thinking of things remote from that profession, of gypsies, of prize-fighters, and of word-makers. Yet he loved the head of the firm, William Simpson, who must have been a kind and tolerant guide to the curious youth. Simpson was for a time Town Clerk of Norwich,[Pg 80] and his portrait hangs in the Blackfriars Hall. Borrow went to live with Mr. Simpson in the Upper Close near the Grammar School. Archdeacon Groome recalled having seen Borrow 'reserved and solitary' haunting the precincts of the playground; another schoolboy, William Drake, remembered him as 'tall, spare, dark-complexioned.'[44] Here is Borrow's account of his master and of his work:

[Pg 80a]

WILLIAM SIMPSON

From a portrait by Thomas Phillips, R.A.

Mr. Simpson was Chamberlain of the city of Norwich and Treasurer of the county of Norfolk. He was Town-Clerk of Norwich in 1826, and has an interest in connection with George Borrow in that Borrow was articled to him as a lawyer's clerk and describes him in Wild Wales as 'the greatest solicitor in East Anglia—indeed I may say the prince of all English solicitors.'

The portrait hangs in the Black Friars Hall, Norwich.

[Pg 81]

And he goes on to tell us that he studied the Welsh language and later the Danish; his master said that his inattention would assuredly make him a bankrupt, and his father sighed over his eccentric and impracticable son. The passion for languages had indeed caught hold of Borrow. Among my Borrow papers I find a memorandum in the handwriting of his stepdaughter in which she says:

We have no difficulty in recognising here the heroine of the Moll Flanders episode in Lavengro. But it was not from casual meetings with Welsh grooms and Danes and Dutchmen that Borrow acquired even such command of various languages as was undoubtedly his. We have it on the authority of an old fellow-pupil at the Grammar School, Burcham, afterwards a London police-magistrate, that William[Pg 82] Taylor gave him lessons in German,[46] but he acquired most of his varied knowledge in these impressionable years in the Corporation Library of Norwich. Dr. Knapp found, in his most laudable examination of some of the books, Borrow's neat pencil notes, the making of which was not laudable on the part of his hero. One book here marked was on ancient Danish literature, the author of which, Olaus Wormius, gave him the hint for calling himself Olaus Borrow for a time—a signature that we find in some of Borrow's published translations. Borrow at this time had aspirations of a literary kind, and Thomas Campbell accepted a translation of Schiller's Diver, which was signed 'O. B.' There were also translations from the German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish, in the Monthly Magazine. Clearly Borrow was becoming a formidable linguist, if not a very exact master of words. Still he remained a vagabond, and loved to wander over Mousehold Heath, to the gypsy encampment, and to make friends with the Romany folk; he loved also to haunt the horse fairs for which Norwich was so celebrated; and he was not averse from the companionship of wilder spirits who loved pugilism, if we may trust Lavengro, and if we may assume, as we justly may, that he many times cast youthful, sympathetic eyes on John Thurtell in these years, the to-be murderer of Weare, then actually living with his father in a house on the Ipswich Road, Thurtell, the father, being in no mean position in the city—an alderman, and a sheriff in 1815. Yes, there was plenty to do and to see in Norwich, and Borrow's memories of it were nearly always kindly:

But at the very centre of Borrow's Norwich life was William Taylor, concerning whom we have already written much. It was a Jew named Mousha, a quack it appears, who pretended to know German and Hebrew, and had but a smattering of either language, who first introduced Borrow to Taylor, and there is a fine dialogue between the two in Lavengro, of which this is the closing fragment:

Taylor it was who, when Borrow determined to try his fortunes in London with those bundles of unsaleable manuscripts, gave him introductions to Sir Richard Phillips and to Thomas Campbell. It was in the agnostic spirit that he had learned from Taylor that he wrote during this period to his one friend in London, Roger Kerrison. Kerrison was grandson of Sir Roger Kerrison, Mayor of Norwich in 1778, as his son Thomas was after him in 1806. Roger was articled, as was Borrow, to the firm of Simpson and Rackham, while his brother Allday was in a drapery store in Norwich, but with mind bent on commercial life in Mexico. George was teaching him Spanish in these years as a preparation for his great adventure. Roger had gone to London to continue his professional experience. He finally became a Norwich solicitor and died in 1882. Allday went to Zacatecas, Mexico, and acquired riches. John Borrow followed him there and met with an early death, as we have seen. Borrow and[Pg 85] Roger Kerrison were great friends at this time; but when Lavengro was written they had ceased to be this, and Roger is described merely as an 'acquaintance' who had found lodgings for him on his first visit to London. As a matter of fact that trip to London was made easy for Borrow by the opportunity given to him of sharing lodgings with Roger Kerrison at Milman Street, Bedford Row, where Borrow put in an appearance on 1st April 1824, some two months after the following letter was written:

To Mr. Roger Kerrison, 18 Milman Street, Bedford Row.

Norwich, Jany. 20, 1824.

George Borrow.[47]
[Pg 86]

Borrow might improve his German—not sufficiently as we shall see in our next chapter—but he would certainly never make a lawyer. Long years afterwards, when, as an old man, he was frequently in Norwich, he not seldom called at that office in Tuck's Court, where five strange years of his life had been spent. A clerk in Rackham's office in these later years recalls him waiting for the principal as he in his youth had watched others waiting.[48]

[Pg 87]

CHAPTER IX

SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS

Borrow lost his father on the 28th February 1824. He reached London on the 2nd April of the same year, and this was the beginning of his many wanderings. He was armed with introductions from William Taylor, and with some translations in manuscript from Danish and Welsh poetry. The principal introduction was to Sir Richard Phillips, a person of some importance in his day, who has so far received but inadequate treatment in our own.[49] Phillips was active in the cause of reform at a certain period in his life, and would seem to have had many sterling qualities before he was spoiled by success. He was born in the neighbourhood of Leicester, and his father was 'in the farming line,' and wanted him to work on the farm, but he determined to seek his fortune in London. After a short absence, during which he clearly proved to himself that he was not at present qualified to capture London, young Phillips returned to the farm. Borrow refers to his patron's vegetarianism, and on this point we have an amusing story from his own[Pg 88] pen! He had been, when previously on the farm, in the habit of attending to a favourite heifer:

Farming not being congenial, Phillips hired a small room in Leicester, and opened a school for instruction in the three R's, a large blue flag on a pole being his 'sign' or signal to the inhabitants of Leicester, who seem to have sent their children in considerable numbers to the young schoolmaster. But little money was to be made out of schooling, and a year later Phillips was, by the kindness of friends, started in a small hosiery shop in Leicester. Throwing himself into politics on the side of reform, Phillips now started the Leicester Herald, to which Dr. Priestley became a contributor. The first number was issued gratis in May 1792. His Memoir informs us that it was an article in this newspaper that secured for its proprietor and editor eighteen months imprisonment in Leicester gaol,[Pg 89] but he was really charged with selling Paine's Rights of Man. The worthy knight had probably grown ashamed of The Rights of Man in the intervening years, and hence the reticence of the memoir. Phillips's gaoler was the once famous Daniel Lambert, the notorious 'fat man' of his day. In gaol Phillips was visited by Lord Moira and the Duke of Norfolk. It was this Lord Moira who said in the House of Lords in 1797 that 'he had seen in Ireland the most absurd, as well as the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under.' Moira became Governor-General of Bengal and Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India. The Duke of Norfolk, a stanch Whig, distinguished himself in 1798 by a famous toast at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Arundel Street, Strand:—'Our sovereign's health—the majesty of the people!' which greatly offended George III., who removed Norfolk from his lord-lieutenancy. Phillips seems to have had a very lax imprisonment, as he conducted the Herald from gaol, contributing in particular a weekly letter. Soon after his release he disposed of the Herald, or permitted it to die. It was revived a few years later as an organ of Toryism. He had started in gaol another journal, The Museum, and he combined this with his hosiery business for some time longer, when an opportune fire relieved him of an apparently uncongenial burden, and with the insurance money in his pocket he set out for London once more. Here he started as a hosier in St. Paul's Churchyard, lodging meantime in the house of a milliner, where he fell in love with one of the apprentices, Miss Griffiths, 'a native of Wales.' His affections were won, we are naïvely informed in the Memoir, by the young woman's talent in the preparation of a vegetable pie. This is[Pg 90] our first glimpse of Lady Phillips—'a quiet, respectable woman,' whom Borrow was to meet at dinner long years afterwards. Inspired, it would seem, by the kindly exhortation of Dr. Priestley, he now transformed his hosiery business in St. Paul's Churchyard into a 'literary repository,' and started a singularly successful career as a publisher. There he produced his long-lived periodical, The Monthly Magazine, which attained to so considerable a fame. Dr. Aikin, a friend of Priestley's, was its editor, but with him Phillips had a quarrel—the first of his many literary quarrels—and they separated. This Dr. Aikin was the father of the better-known Lucy Aikin, and was a Nonconformist who suffered for his opinions in these closing years of the eighteenth century, even as Priestley did. He was the author of many works, including the once famous Evenings at Home, written in conjunction with his sister, Mrs. Barbauld;[51] and after his quarrel with Phillips he founded a new publication issued by the house of Longman, and entitled The Athenæum. Hereupon he and Phillips quarrelled again, because Dr. Aikin described himself in advertisements of The Athenæum as 'J. Aikin, M.D., late editor of The Monthly Magazine.' Aikin's contributors to The Monthly included Capell Lofft, of whom we know too little, and Dr. Wolcot, of whom we know too much. Meanwhile Phillips's publishing business grew apace, and he removed to larger premises in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, an address which we find upon many famous publications of his period. A catalogue of his[Pg 91] books lies before me dated 'January 1805.' It includes many works still upon our shelves. Almon's Memoirs and Correspondence of John Wilkes, Samuel Richardson's Life and Correspondence, for example, several of the works of Maria Edgeworth, including her Moral Tales, many of the works of William Godwin, including Caleb Williams, and the earlier books of that still interesting woman and once popular novelist, Lady Morgan, whose Poems as Sydney Owenson bears Phillips's name on its title-page, as does also her first successful novel The Wild Irish Girl, and other of her stories. My own interest in Phillips commenced when I met him in the pages of Lady Morgan's Memoirs.[52] Thomas Moore, Lady Morgan tells us,

Here, in a little room over the shop, Sydney heard him sing two of his songs, and was inspired thereby to write her first novels, St. Clair and The Novice of St. Dominick. The first was published in Dublin; over the second she corresponded with Phillips, and his letters to her commence with one dated from Bridge Street, 6th April 1805, in which he wishes[Pg 92] her to send the manuscript of The Novice to him as one 'often (undeservedly) complimented as the most liberal of my trade!' She determined, fresh from a governess situation, to bring the manuscript herself. Phillips was charmed with his new author, and really seems to have treated her very liberally. He insisted, however, on having The Novice cut down from six volumes to four, and she was wont to say that nothing but regard for her feelings prevented him from reducing it to three.[53] The Novice of St. Dominick was a favourite book with the younger Pitt, who read it over again in his last illness. Then followed—in 1806—Sydney Owenson's new novel, The Wild Irish Girl, and it led to an amusing correspondence with its author on the part of Phillips on the one side, and Johnson, who, it will be remembered, was Cowper's publisher, on the other. Phillips was indignant that, having first brought Sydney into fame, she should dare to ask more money on that account. As is the case with every novelist to-day who scores one success, Miss Owenson had formed a good idea of her value, and there is a letter to Johnson in which she admitted that Phillips's offer was a generous one. Johnson had offered her £300 for the copyright of The Wild Irish Girl. Phillips had offered only £200 down and £50 each for the second and third editions. When Phillips heard that Johnson had outbidden him, he described the offer as 'monstrous,' and that it was 'inspired by a spirit of revenge.' He would not, he declared, increase his offer, but a little later he writes from Bridge Street to Sydney Owenson as his 'dear, bewitching, and deluding Syren,' and promises the £300. A few months later he gave her a hundred[Pg 93] pounds for a slight volume of poems, which certainly never paid for its publication, although Scott and Moore and many another were making much money out of poetry in those days. In any case Phillips did not accept Miss Owenson's next story with alacrity, in spite of the undoubted success of The Wild Irish Girl. She no doubt asked too much for Ida of Athens. Phillips probably thought, after reading the first volume in type, that it was very inferior work, as indeed it was. Athens was described without the author ever having seen the city. After much wrangling, in which the lady said that her 'prince of publishers,' as she had once called him, had 'treated her barbarously,' the novel went into the hands of the Longmans, who published it, not without some remonstrance as to certain of its sentiments. The successful Lady Morgan afterwards described Ida as a bad book, so perhaps here, as usually, Phillips was not far wrong in his judgment. A similar quarrel seems to have taken place over the next novel, The Missionary. Here Phillips again received the manuscript, discussed terms with its author, and returned it. The firm of Stockdale and Miller were his successful rivals. Later and more prosperous novels, O'Donnel in particular, were issued by Henry Colburn, and Phillips now disappears from Lady Morgan's life. I have told the story of Phillips's relation with Lady Morgan at length because at no other point do we come into so near a contact with him. In Fell's Memoir Phillips is described—in 1808—as 'certainly now the first publisher in London,' but while he may have been this in the volume of his trade—and school-books made an important part of it—he was not in mere 'names.' Most of his successful writers—Sydney Owenson, Thomas Skinner Surr,[Pg 94] Dr. Gregory, and the rest—have now fallen into oblivion. The school-books that he issued have lasted even to our own day, notably Dr. Mavor's Spelling Book. Dr. Mavor was a Scotsman from Aberdeen, who came to London and became Phillips's chief hack. There are no less than twenty of Mavor's school-books in the catalogue before me. They include Mavor's History of England, Mavor's Universal History, and Mavor's History of Greece. In the Memoir of 1808 it is claimed that 'Mavor' is but a pseudonym for Phillips, and the claim is also made, quite wrongfully, by John Timbs, who, before he became acting editor of the Illustrated London News under Herbert Ingram, and an indefatigable author, was Phillips's private secretary.[54] It seems clear, however, that in the case of Blair's Catechism and Goldsmith's Geography, and many another book for schools, Phillips was 'Blair' and 'Goldsmith' and many another imaginary person, for the books in question numbered about two hundred in all. For these books there must have been quite an army of literary hacks employed during the twenty years prior to the appearance of George Borrow in that great army. On 9th November 1807, the Lord Mayor's procession through London included Richard Phillips among its sheriffs, and he was knighted by George III. in the following year. During his period of office he effected many reforms in the City prisons. John Timbs, in his Walks and Talks about London, tells us that Phillips's colleague in the[Pg 95] shrievalty was one Smith, who afterwards became Lord Mayor:

Two volumes before me show Phillips as the precursor of many of the publishers of one-volume books of reference so plentiful in our day. A Million of Facts is one of them, and A Chronology of Public Events Within the Last Fifty Years from 1771 to 1821 is another, while one of the earliest and most refreshing guides to London and its neighbourhood is afforded us in A Morning Walk from London to Kew, which first appeared in The Monthly Magazine, but was reprinted in 1817 with the name 'Sir Richard Phillips' as author on the title-page. Phillips was now no longer a publisher. Here we have some pleasant glimpses of a bygone era, many trite reflections, but not enough topography to make the book one of permanent interest. It would not, in fact, be worth reprinting.[55]

This, then, was the man to whom George Borrow presented himself in 1824. Phillips was fifty-seven years of age. He had made a moderate fortune and lost it, and was now enjoying another perhaps less satisfying; it included the profits of The Monthly Review,[Pg 96] repurchased after his bankruptcy, and some rights in many of the school-books. But the great publishing establishment in Bridge Street had long been broken up. Borrow would have found Taylor's introduction to Phillips quite useless had the worthy knight not at the moment been keen on a new magazine and seen the importance of a fresh 'hack' to help to run it. Moreover, had he not written a great book which only the Germans could appreciate, Twelve Essays on the Phenomena of Nature? Here, he thought, was the very man to produce this book in a German dress. Taylor was a thorough German scholar, and he had vouched for the excellent German of his pupil and friend. Hence a certain cordiality which did not win Borrow's regard, but was probably greater than many a young man would receive to-day from a publisher-prince upon whom he might call laden only with a bundle of translations from the Danish and the Welsh. Here—in Lavengro—is the interview between publisher and poet, with the editor's factotum Bartlett, whom Borrow calls Taggart, as witness:

[Pg 96a]

SIR JOHN BOWRING in 1826

From a portrait by John King now in the National Portrait Gallery.

JOHN P. HASFELD in 1835

From a portrait by an Unknown Artist formerly belonging to George Borrow

WILLIAM TAYLOR

From a portrait by J. Thomson, printed in the year 1821, and engraved in Robberds's Life of Taylor.

SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS

From a portrait by James Saxon, painted in 1828, now in the National Portrait Gallery.

FRIENDS OF BORROW'S EARLY YEARS

[Transcriber's Note: This is the caption for the page of four portraits, each portrait's caption is shown above.]

[Pg 97]

Phillips explains that he has given up publishing, except 'under the rose,' had only The Monthly Magazine, here[56] called The Magazine, but contemplated yet another monthly, The Universal Review, here called The Oxford. He gave Borrow much the same sound advice that a publisher would have given him to-day—that poetry is not a marketable commodity, and that if you want to succeed in prose you must, as a rule, write trash—the most acceptable trash of that day being The Dairyman's Daughter,[57] which has sold in hundreds of thousands, and is still much prized by the Evangelical folk who buy the publications of the Religious Tract Society. Phillips, moreover, asked him to dine to meet his wife, his son, and his son's wife,[58] and we know what an amusing account of that dinner Borrow gives in Lavengro. Moreover, he set Borrow upon his first piece of hack-work, the Celebrated Trials, and gave him something to do upon The Universal Review and also upon The Monthly. The Universal lasted only for six numbers, dying in January 1825. In that year appeared the six volumes of the Celebrated Trials, of which we have something to[Pg 98] say in our next chapter. Borrow found Phillips most exacting, always suggesting the names of new criminals, and leaving it to the much sweated author to find the books from which to extract the necessary material:

[Pg 99]

Then came the final catastrophe. Borrow could not translate Phillips's great masterpiece, Twelve Essays on the Proximate Causes, into German with any real effectiveness although the testimonial of the enthusiastic Taylor had led Phillips to assume that he could. Borrow, as we shall see, knew many languages, and knew them well colloquially, but he was not a grammarian, and he could not write accurately in any one of his numerous tongues. His wonderful memory gave him the words, but not always any thoroughness of construction. He could make a good translation of a poem by Schiller, because he brought his own poetic fancy to the venture, but he had no interest in Phillips's philosophy, and so he doubtless made a very bad translation, as German friends were soon able to assure Phillips, who had at last to go to a German for a translation, and the book appeared at Stuttgart in 1826.[60] Meanwhile, Phillips's new magazine, The Universal Review, went on its course. It lasted only for a few numbers, as we have said—from March 1824 to January 1825—and it was entirely devoted to reviews, many of them written by Borrow, but without any distinction calling for comment to-day. Dr. Knapp thought that Gifford was the editor, with Phillips's son and George Borrow assisting. Gifford translated Juvenal, and it was for a long time assumed that Borrow wished merely to disguise Gifford's identity when he referred to his editor as the translator of Quintilian. But Sir Leslie Stephen has pointed out in Literature that John Carey (1756-1826), who actually edited Quintilian in 1822, was Phillips's editor, 'All the poetry which I reviewed,'[Pg 100] Borrow tells us, 'appeared to be published at the expense of the authors. All the publications which fell under my notice I treated in a gentlemanly ... manner—no personalities, no vituperation, no shabby insinuations; decorum, decorum was the order of the day.' And one feels that Borrow was not very much at home. But he went on with his Newgate Lives and Trials, which, however, were to be published with another imprint, although at the instance of Phillips. By that time he and that worthy publisher had parted company. Probably Phillips had set out for Brighton, which was to be his home for the remainder of his life.

[Pg 101]

CHAPTER X

FAUSTUS AND ROMANTIC BALLADS

In the early pages of Lavengro Borrow tells us nearly all we are ever likely to know of his sojourn in London in the years 1824 and 1825, during which time he had those interviews with Sir Richard Phillips which are recorded in our last chapter. Dr. Knapp, indeed, prints a little note from him to his friend Kerrison, in which he begs his friend to come to him as he believes he is dying. Roger Kerrison, it would seem, had been so frightened by Borrow's depression and threats of suicide that he had left the lodgings at 16 Milman Street, Bedford Row, and removed himself elsewhere, and so Borrow was left friendless to fight what he called his 'horrors' alone. The depression was not unnatural. From his own vivid narrative we learn of Borrow's bitter failure as an author. No one wanted his translations from the Welsh and the Danish, and Phillips clearly had no further use for him after he had compiled his Newgate Lives and Trials (Borrow's name in Lavengro for Celebrated Trials), and was doubtless inclined to look upon him as an impostor for professing, with William Taylor's sanction, a mastery of the German language which had been demonstrated to be false with regard to his own book. No 'spirited publisher' had come forward to give reality to his dream thus set down:[Pg 102]

He has a tale to tell us in Lavengro of a certain Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, the Great Traveller, the purchase of which from him by a publisher at the last moment saved him from starvation and enabled him to take to the road, there to meet the many adventures that have become immortal in the pages of Lavengro. Dr. Knapp has encouraged the idea that Joseph Sell was a real book, ignoring the fact that the very title suggests doubts, and was probably meant to suggest them. In Norfolk, as elsewhere, a 'sell' is a word in current slang used for an imposture or a cheat, and doubtless Borrow meant to make merry with the credulous. There was, we may be perfectly sure, no Joseph Sell, and it is more reasonable to suppose that it was the sale of his translation of Klinger's Faustus that gave him the much needed money at this crisis. Dr. Knapp pictures Borrow as carrying the manuscript of his translation of Faustus with him to London. There is not the slightest evidence of this. It may be reasonably assumed that Borrow made the translation from Klinger's novel during his sojourn in London. It is true the preface is dated 'Norwich, April 1825,' but Borrow did not leave London until the end of May 1825, that is to[Pg 103] say, until after he had negotiated with 'W. Simpkin and R. Marshall,' now the well-known firm of Simpkin and Marshall, for the publication of the little volume. That firm, unfortunately, has no record of the transaction. My impression is that Borrow in his wandering after old volumes on crime for his great compilation, Celebrated Trials, came across the French translation of Klinger's novel published at Amsterdam. From that translation he acknowledges that he borrowed the plate which serves as frontispiece—a plate entitled 'The Corporation Feast.' It represents the corporation of Frankfort at a banquet turned by the devil into various animals. It has been erroneously assumed that Borrow had had something to do with the designing of this plate, and that he had introduced the corporation of Norwich in vivid portraiture into the picture. Borrow does, indeed, interpolate a reference to Norwich into his translation of a not too complimentary character, for at that time he had no very amiable feelings towards his native city. Of the inhabitants of Frankfort he says:

In the original German version of 1791 we have the town of Nuremberg thus satirised. But Borrow was not the first translator to seize the opportunity of adapting the reference for personal ends. In the French translation of 1798, published at Amsterdam, and entitled Les Aventures du Docteur Faust, the[Pg 104] translator has substituted Auxerre for Nuremberg. What makes me think that Borrow used only the French version in his translation is the fact that in his preface he refers to the engravings of that version, one of which he reproduced; whereas the engravings are in the German version as well.

Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752-1831), who was responsible for Borrow's 'first book,' was responsible for much else of an epoch-making character. It was he who by one of his many plays, Sturm und Drang, gave a name to an important period of German Literature. In 1780 von Klinger entered the service of Russia, and in 1790 married a natural daughter of the Empress Catherine. Thus his novel, Faust's Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt, was actually first published at St. Petersburg in 1791. This was seventeen years before Goethe published his first part of Faust, a book which by its exquisite poetry was to extinguish for all self-respecting Germans Klinger's turgid prose. Borrow, like the translator of Rousseau's Confessions and of many another classic, takes refuge more than once in the asterisk. Klinger's Faustus, with much that was bad and even bestial, has merits. The devil throughout shows his victim a succession of examples of 'man's inhumanity to man.' Borrow's translation of Klinger's novel was reprinted in 1864 without any acknowledgment of the name of the translator, and only a few stray words being altered.[62] Borrow nowhere[Pg 105] mentions Klinger's name in his latter volume, of which the title-page runs:

I doubt very much if he really knew who was the author, as the book in both the German editions I have seen as well as in the French version bears no author's name on its title-page. A letter of Borrow's in the possession of an American collector indicates that he was back in Norwich in September 1825, after, we may assume, three months' wandering among gypsies and tinkers. It is written from Willow Lane, and is apparently to the publishers of Faustus:

This letter clearly demonstrates that the guileless Simpkin and the equally guileless Marshall had paid Borrow for the right to publish Faustus, and even though part of the payment was met by a bill, I think we may safely find in the transaction whatever verity there may be in the Joseph Sell episode. 'Let me know how you sold your manuscript,' writes Borrow's brother to him so late as the year 1829. And this was doubtless Faustus. The action of the Norwich libraries in burning the book would clearly have had the sympathy of one of its few reviewers had he been informed of the[Pg 106] circumstance. It is thus that the Literary Gazette for 16th July 1825 refers to Borrow's little book:

Borrow returned then to Norwich in the autumn of 1825 a disappointed man so far as concerned the giving of his poetical translations to the world, from which he had hoped so much. No 'spirited publisher' had been forthcoming, although Dr. Knapp's researches have unearthed a 'note' in The Monthly Magazine, which, after the fashion of the anticipatory literary gossip of our day, announced that Olaus Borrow was about to issue Legends and Popular Superstitions of the North, 'in two elegant volumes.' But this never appeared. Quite a number of Borrow's translations from divers languages had appeared from time to time, beginning with a version of Schiller's 'Diver' in The New Monthly Magazine for 1823, continuing with Stolberg's 'Ode to a Mountain Torrent' in The Monthly Magazine, and including the 'Deceived Merman.' These he collected into book form and, not to be deterred by the coldness of heartless London publishers, issued them by subscription. Three copies of the slim octavo book lie before me, with separate title-pages:

The book contains an introduction in verse by Allan Cunningham, whose acquaintance Borrow seems to have made in London. It commences:

Sing, sing, my friend, breathe life again
Through Norway's song and Denmark's strain:
On flowing Thames and Forth, in flood,
Pour Haco's war-song, fierce and rude.

Cunningham had not himself climbed very far up the literary ladder in 1825, although he was forty-one years of age. At one time a stonemason in a Scots village, he had entered Chantrey's studio, and was 'superintendent of the works' to that eminent sculptor at the time when Borrow called upon him in London, and made an acquaintance which never seems to have extended beyond this courtesy to the younger man's Danish Ballads. The point of sympathy of course was that in the year 1825 Cunningham had published The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern. But Allan Cunningham, whose Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters is his best remembered book to-day, scarcely comes into this story. There are four letters from Cunningham to Borrow in Dr. Knapp's Life, and two from Borrow to Cunningham. The latter gave his young friend much good advice. He told him, for example, to send copies of his book to the newspapers—to the Literary Gazette in particular, and 'Walter[Pg 108] Scott must not be forgotten.' Dr. Knapp thinks that the newspapers were forgotten, and that Borrow neglected to send to them. In any case not a single review appeared. But it is not exactly true that Borrow ignored the usual practice of authors so entirely as Dr. Knapp supposes. There is a letter to Borrow among my Borrow Papers from Francis Palgrave the historian, who became Sir Francis Palgrave seven years later, which throws some light upon the subject:

To George Borrow

Parliament St., 17 June 1826.

Francis Palgrave.

It is probable that he did also send a copy to Scott, and it is Dr. Knapp's theory that 'that busy writer forgot to acknowledge the courtesy.' It may be that this is so. It has been the source of many a literary prejudice. Carlyle had a bitterness in his heart against Scott for much the same cause. Rarely indeed can the struggling author endure to be ignored by the radiantly successful one. It must have been the more galling in that a few years earlier Scott had been lifted by the ballad from obscurity to fame. Borrow did not in any case lack encouragement from Allan Cunningham: 'I like your Danish ballads much,' he writes. 'Get out of[Pg 109] bed, George Borrow, and be sick or sleepy no longer. A fellow who can give us such exquisite Danish ballads has no right to repose.'[64] Borrow, on his side, thanks Cunningham for his 'noble lines,' and tells him that he has got 'half of his Songs of Scotland by heart.'

Five hundred copies of the Romantic Ballads were printed in Norwich by S. Wilkin, about two hundred being subscribed for, mainly in that city, the other three hundred being dispatched to London—to Taylor, whose name appears on the London title-page, although he seems to have passed on the book very quickly to Wightman and Cramp, for what reason we are not informed. Borrow tells us that the two hundred subscriptions of half a guinea 'amply paid expenses,' but he must have been cruelly disappointed, as he was doomed to be more than once in his career, by the lack of public appreciation outside of Norwich. Yet there were many reasons for this. If Scott had made the ballad popular, he had also destroyed it for a century—perhaps for ever—by substituting the novel as the favourite medium for the storyteller. Great ballads we were to have in every decade from that day to this, but never another 'best seller' like Marmion or The Lady of the Lake. Our popular poets had to express themselves in other ways. Then Borrow, although his verse has been underrated by those who have not seen it at its best, or who are incompetent to appraise poetry, was not very effective here, notwithstanding that the stories in verse in Romantic Ballads are all entirely interesting. This fact is most in evidence in a case where a real poet, not of the greatest, has told the same story. We owe a rendering of 'The Deceived Merman'[Pg 110] to both George Borrow and Matthew Arnold, but how widely different the treatment! The story is of a merman who rose out of the water and enticed a mortal—fair Agnes or Margaret—under the waves; she becomes his wife, bears him children, and then asks to return to earth. Arriving there she refuses to go back when the merman comes disconsolately to the churchdoor for her. Here are a few lines from the two versions, which demonstrate that here at least Borrow was no poet and that Arnold was a very fine one:

It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin's two hundred copies a 'list of subscribers' is given. It opens with the name of the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow[Pg 111] Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in Lavengro by Haydon's portrait, is there also. Among London names we find 'F. Arden,' which recalls his friend 'Francis Ardry' in Lavengro, John Bowring, Borrow's new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin Haydon, and John Timbs, But the name that most strikes the eye is that of 'Thurtell.' Three of the family are among the subscribers, including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare's unhappy murderer always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.

[Pg 112]

CHAPTER XI

CELEBRATED TRIALS AND JOHN THURTELL

Borrow's first book was Faustus, and his second was Romantic Ballads, the one being published, as we have seen, in 1825, the other in 1826. This chronology has the appearance of ignoring the Celebrated Trials, but then it is scarcely possible to count Celebrated Trials[65] as one of Borrow's books at all. It is largely a compilation, exactly as the Newgate Calendar and Howell's State Trials are compilations. In his preface to the work Borrow tells us that he has differentiated the book from the Newgate Calendar[66] and the State Trials[67] by the fact that he had made considerable compression. This was so, and in fact in many cases he has used the blue pencil rather than the pen—at least in the earlier volumes. But Borrow attempted something much more comprehensive than the Newgate Calendar and the State Trials in his book. In the former work the trials range from 1700 to 1802; in the latter from the[Pg 113] trial of Becket in 1163 to the trial of Thistlewood in 1820. Both works are concerned solely with this country. Borrow went all over Europe, and the trials of Joan of Arc, Count Struensee, Major André, Count Cagliostro, Queen Marie Antoinette, the Duc d'Enghien, and Marshal Ney, are included in his volumes. Moreover, while what may be called state trials are numerous, including many of the cases in Howell, the greater number are of a domestic nature, including nearly all that are given in the Newgate Calendar. In the first two volumes he has naturally mainly state trials to record; the later volumes record sordid everyday crimes, and here Borrow is more at home. His style when he rewrites the trials is more vigorous, and his narrative more interesting. It is to be hoped that the exigent publisher, who he assures us made him buy the books for his compilation out of the £50 that he paid for it, was able to present him with a set of the State Trials, if only in one of the earlier and cheaper issues of the work than the one that now has a place in every lawyer's library.[68]

The third volume of Celebrated Trials, although it opens with the trial of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes.[Pg 114] I have said that Faustus is an allegory of 'man's inhumanity to man.' That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature of Celebrated Trials. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti. Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which he usually carried 'to carve fruit and sweetmeats,' and killed his assailant. In that age, when our law courts were a veritable shambles, how cheerful it is to find that the jury returned a verdict of 'self-defence.' But then Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, and David Garrick gave evidence to character, representing Baretti as 'a man of benevolence, sobriety, modesty, and learning.' This trial is an oasis of mercy in a desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his 'trials' to the very year before the date of publication, and the last trial in the book is that of 'Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,' for forgery. Fauntleroy was a quite respectable banker of unimpeachable character, to whom had fallen at a very early age the charge of a banking business that was fundamentally unsound. It is clear that he had honestly endeavoured to put things on a better footing, that he lived simply, and had no gambling or other vices. At a crisis, however, he forged a document, in other words signed a transfer of stock which he had no right to do, the 'subscribing witness' to his power of attorney being Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and father of the distinguished poet.[69] Well, Fauntleroy was sentenced to be hanged—and he was duly hanged at Newgate on 30th October[Pg 115] 1824, only thirteen years before Queen Victoria came to the throne!

Borrow has affirmed that from a study of the Newgate Calendar and the compilation of his Celebrated Trials he first learned to write genuine English, and it is a fact that there are some remarkably dramatic effects in these volumes, although one here withholds from Borrow the title of 'author' because so much is 'scissors and paste,' and the purple passages are only occasional. All the same I am astonished that no one has thought it worth while to make a volume of these dramatic episodes, which are clearly the work of Borrow, and owe nothing to the innumerable pamphlets and chap-books that he brought into use. Take such an episode as that of Schening and Harlin, two young German women, one of whom pretended to have murdered her infant in the presence of the other because she madly supposed that this would secure them bread—and they were starving. The trial, the scene at the execution, the confession on the scaffold of the misguided but innocent girl, the respite, and then the execution—these make up as thrilling a narrative as is contained in the pages of fiction. Assuredly Borrow did not spare himself in that race round the bookstalls of London to find the material which the grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example, Sir Herbert Croft's volume, Love and Madness, the supposed correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft's. Borrow accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of the Hackman trial.

But after all, the trial which we read with greatest interest in these six volumes is that of John Thurtell,[Pg 116] because Borrow had known Thurtell in his youth, and gives us more than one glimpse of him in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. We recall, for example, Lavengro's interview with the magistrate when a visitor is announced:

[Pg 117]

In the original manuscript in my possession the name 'John Thurtell' is given as the answer to that inquiry. In the printed book the chapter ends more abruptly as we see. The second reference is even more dramatic. It occurs when Lavengro has a conversation with his friend the gypsy Petulengro in a thunderstorm—when all are hurrying to the prize-fight. Here let Borrow tell his story:

There is yet another reference by Borrow to Thurtell in The Gypsies of Spain, which runs as follows:

Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare—the Gill's Hill Murder, as it was called. Certainly no murder of modern times has had so many indirect literary associations. Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt, Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the tragedy:

Carlyle's division of human beings of the upper classes into 'noblemen, gentlemen, and gigmen,' which occurs[Pg 119] in his essay on Richter, and a later reference to gig-manhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe's Works, had their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell, when the question being asked, 'What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?' brought the answer, 'He was always a respectable person.' 'What do you mean by respectable?' the witness was asked. 'He kept a gig,' was the reply, which brought the word 'gigmanity' into our language.[70]

I have said that John Thurtell and two members of his family became subscribers for Borrow's Romantic Ballads,[71] and it is certain that Borrow must often have met Thurtell, that is to say looked at him from a distance, in some of the scenes of prize-fighting which both affected, Borrow merely as a youthful spectator, Thurtell as a reckless backer of one or other combatant. Thurtell's father was an alderman of Norwich living in a good house on the Ipswich Road when the son's name rang through England as that of a murderer. The father was born in 1765 and died in 1846. Four years after his son John was hanged he was elected Mayor of Norwich, in recognition of his violent ultra-Whig[Pg 120] or blue and white political opinions. He had been nominated as mayor both in 1818 and 1820, but it was perhaps the extraordinary 'advertisement' of his son's shameful death that gave the citizens of Norwich the necessary enthusiasm to elect Alderman Thurtell as mayor in 1828. It was in those oligarchical days a not unnatural fashion to be against the Government. The feast at the Guildhall on this occasion was attended by four hundred and sixty guests. A year before John Thurtell was hanged, in 1823, his father moved a violent political resolution in Norwich, but was out-Heroded by Cobbett, who moved a much more extreme one over his head and carried it by an immense majority. It was a brutal time, and there cannot be a doubt but that Alderman Thurtell, while busy setting the world straight, failed to bring up his family very well. John, as we shall see, was hanged; Thomas, another brother, was associated with him in many disgraceful transactions; while a third brother, George, also a subscriber, by the way, to Borrow's Romantic Ballads, who was a landscape gardener at Eaton, died in prison in 1848 under sentence for theft. Apart from a rather riotous and bad bringing up, which may be pleaded in extenuation, it is not possible to waste much sympathy over John Thurtell. He had thoroughly disgraced himself in Norwich before he removed to London. There he got further and further into difficulties, and one of the many publications which arose out of his trial and execution was devoted to pointing the moral of the evils of gambling.[72] It was bad luck at cards,[Pg 121] and the loss of much money to William Weare, who seems to have been an exceedingly vile person, that led to the murder. Thurtell had a friend named Probert who lived in a quiet cottage in a byway of Hertfordshire—Gill's Hill, near Elstree. He suggested to Weare in a friendly way that they should go for a day's shooting at Gill's Hill, and that Probert would put them up for the night. Weare went home, collected a few things in a bag, and took a hackney coach to a given spot, where Thurtell met him with a gig. The two men drove out of London together. The date was 24th October 1823. On the high-road they met and passed Probert and a companion named Joseph Hunt, who had even been instructed by Thurtell to bring a sack with him—this was actually used to carry away the body—and must therefore have been privy to the intended murder. By the time the second gig containing Probert and Hunt arrived near Probert's cottage, Thurtell met it in the roadway, according to their accounts, and told the two men that he had done the deed; that he had killed Weare first by ineffectively shooting him, then by dashing out his brains with his pistol, and finally by cutting his throat. Thurtell further told his friends, if their evidence was to be trusted, that he had left the body behind a hedge. In the night the three men placed the body in a sack and carried it to a pond near Probert's house and threw it in. The next night they fished it out and threw it into another pond some distance away.[Pg 122]

Thurtell meanwhile had divided the spoil—some £20, which he said was all that he had obtained from Weare's body—with his companions. Hunt, it may be mentioned, afterwards declared his conviction that Thurtell, when he first committed the murder, had removed his victim's principal treasure, notes to the value of three or four hundred pounds. Suspicion was aroused, and the hue and cry raised through the finding by a labourer of the pistol in the hedge, and the discovery of a pool of blood on the roadway. Probert promptly turned informer; Hunt also tried to save himself by a rambling confession, and it was he who revealed where the body was concealed, accompanying the officers to the pond and pointing out the exact spot where the corpse would be found. When recovered the body was taken to the Artichoke Inn at Elstree, and here the coroner's inquest was held. Meanwhile Thurtell had been arrested in London, and taken down to Elstree to be present at the inquest. A verdict of guilty against all three miscreants was given by the coroner's jury, and Weare's body was buried in Elstree Churchyard.[73]

[Pg 123]

In January 1824 John Thurtell was brought to trial at Hertford Assizes, and Hunt also. But first of all there were some interesting proceedings in the Court of King's Bench, before the Chief Justice and two other judges,[74] complaining that Thurtell had not been allowed to see his counsel. And there were other points at issue. Thurtell's counsel moved for a criminal injunction against the proprietor of the Surrey Theatre in that a performance had been held there, and was being held, which assumed Thurtell's guilt, the identical horse and gig being exhibited in which Weare was supposed to have ridden to the scene of his death. Finally this was arranged, and a mandamus was granted 'commanding the admission of legal advisers to the prisoner.' At last the trial came on at Hertford before Mr. Justice Park. It lasted two days, although the judge wished to go on all night in order to finish in one. But the protest of Thurtell, supported by the jury, led to an adjournment. Probert had been set free and appeared as a witness. The jury gave a verdict of guilty, and Thurtell and Hunt were sentenced to be hanged, but Hunt escaped with[Pg 124] transportation. Thurtell made his own speech for the defence, which had a great effect upon the jury, until the judge swept most of its sophistries away. It was, however, a very able performance. Thurtell's line of defence was to declare that Hunt and Probert were the murderers, and that he was a victim of their perjuries. If hanged, he would be hanged on circumstantial evidence only, and he gave, with great elaboration, the details of a number of cases where men had been wrongfully hanged upon circumstantial evidence. His lawyers had apparently provided him with books containing these examples from the past, and his month in prison was devoted to this defence, which showed great ability. The trial took place on 6th January 1824, and Thurtell was hanged on the 9th, in front of Hertford Gaol: his body was given to the Anatomical Museum in London. A contemporary report says that Thurtell, on the scaffold,

The reader of Lavengro might speculate whether that 'young gentleman' was Borrow, but Borrow was in Norwich in January 1824, his father dying in the following month. In his Celebrated Trials Borrow tells the story of the execution with wonderful vividness, and supplies effective quotations from 'an eyewitness.' Borrow no doubt exaggerated his acquaintance with Thurtell, as in his Robinson Crusoe romance he was fully entitled to do for effect. He was too young at the time to have been much noticed by a man so much[Pg 125] his senior. The writer who accepts Borrow's own statement that he really gave him 'some lessons in the noble art' is too credulous,[75] and the statement that Thurtell's house 'on the Ipswich Road was a favourite rendezvous for the Fancy' is unsupported by evidence. Old Alderman Thurtell owned the house in question, and we find no evidence that he encouraged his son's predilection for prize-fighting. In The Romany Rye he gives his friend the jockey as his authority for the following apologia:

[Pg 126]

CHAPTER XII

BORROW AND THE FANCY

George Borrow had no sympathy with Thurtell the gambler. I can find no evidence in his career of any taste for games of hazard or indeed for games of any kind, although we recall that as a mere child he was able to barter a pack of cards for the Irish language. But he had certainly very considerable sympathy with the notorious criminal as a friend and patron of prize-fighting. This now discredited pastime Borrow ever counted a virtue. Was not his God-fearing father a champion in his way, or, at least, had he not in open fight beaten the champion of the moment, Big Ben Brain? Moreover, who was there in those days with blood in his veins who did not count the cultivation of the Fancy as the noblest and most manly of pursuits! Why, William Hazlitt, a prince among English essayists, whose writings are a beloved classic in our day, wrote in The New Monthly Magazine in these very years[76] his own eloquent impression, and even introduces John Thurtell more than once as 'Tom Turtle,' little thinking then of the fate that was so soon to overtake him. What could be more lyrical than this:[Pg 127]

And then the best historian of prize-fighting, Henry Downes Miles, the author of Pugilistica, has his own statement of the case. You will find it in his monograph on John Jackson, the pugilist who taught Lord Byron to box, and received the immortality of an eulogistic footnote in Don Juan. Here is Miles's defence:

From Samuel Johnson to George Bernard Shaw literary England has had a kindness for the pugilist, although the magistrate has long, and rightly, ruled him out as impossible. Borrow carried his enthusiasm further than any, and no account of him that concentrates attention upon his accomplishment as a distributor of Bibles and ignores his delight in fisticuffs, has any grasp of the real George Borrow. Indeed it may be said, and will be shown in the course of our story, that Borrow entered upon Bible distribution in the spirit of a pugilist rather than that of an evangelist. But to return to Borrow's pugilistic experiences. He claims, as we have seen, occasionally to have put on the gloves with John Thurtell. He describes vividly enough his own conflicts with the Flaming Tinman[Pg 128] and with Petulengro. His one heroine, Isopel Berners, had 'Fair Play and Long Melford' as her ideal, 'Long Melford' being the good right-handed blow with which Lavengro conquered the Tinman. Isopel, we remember, had learned in Long Melford Union to 'Fear God and take your own part!'

George Borrow, indeed, was at home with the whole army of prize-fighters, who came down to us like the Roman Cæsars or the Kings of England in a noteworthy procession, their dynasty commencing with James Fig of Thame, who began to reign in 1719, and closing with Tom King, who beat Heenan in 1863, or with Jem Mace, who flourished in a measure until 1872. With what zest must Borrow have followed the account of the greatest battle of all, that between Heenan and Tom Sayers at Farnborough in 1860, when it was said that Parliament had been emptied to patronise a prize-fight; and this although Heenan complained that he had been chased out of eight counties. For by this time, in spite of lordly patronage, pugilism was doomed, and the more harmless boxing had taken its place. 'Pity that corruption should have crept in amongst them,' sighed Lavengro in a memorable passage, in which he also has his pæan of praise for the bruisers of England:

[Pg 128a]

THE FAMILY OF JASPER PETULENGRO

'Jasper' or Ambrose Smith was a very old man when this picture was taken by Mr. Andrew Innes of Dunbar in 1878. In both pictures we see Sanspirella, Jasper's wife, seated and holding a child. We are indebted to Mr. Charles Spence of Dunbar for these interesting groups.

[Pg 129]

Yes: Borrow was never hard on the bruisers of England, and followed their achievements, it may be said, from his cradle to his grave. His beloved father had brought him up, so to speak, upon memories of one who was champion before George was born—Big Ben Brain of Bristol. Brain, although always called 'Big Ben,' was only 5 feet 10 in. high. He was for years a coal porter at a wharf off the Strand. It was in 1791 that Ben Brain won the championship which placed him upon a pinnacle in the minds of all robust people. The Duke of Hamilton then backed him against the then champion, Tom Johnson, for five hundred guineas. 'Public expectation,' says The Oracle, a contemporary newspaper, 'never was raised so high by any pugilistic contest; great bets were laid, and it is estimated £20,000 was wagered on this occasion.' Ben Brain was the undisputed conqueror, we are told, in eighteen rounds, occupying no more than twenty-one minutes.[78] Brain died in 1794, and all the biographers tell of the piety of his end, so that Borrow's father may have read the Bible to him in his last moments, as Borrow avers,[79] but I very much doubt the accuracy of the following:

We have already shown that Brain lived for four years after his fight with Johnson. Perhaps the fight in Hyde Park between Borrow's father and Ben, as narrated in Lavengro, is all romancing. It makes[Pg 130] good reading in any case, as does Borrow's eulogy of some of his own contemporaries of the prize-ring:

All this is very accurate history. We know that there really was this wonderful gathering of the bruisers of England assembled in the neighbourhood of Norwich in July 1820, that is to say, sixteen miles away at North Walsham. More than 25,000 men, it is estimated, gathered to see Edward Painter of Norwich fight Tom Oliver of London for a purse of a hundred guineas. There were three Belchers, heroes of the prize-ring, but Borrow here refers to Tom, whose younger brother, Jem, had died in 1811 at the age of thirty. Tom Belcher died in 1854 at the age of seventy-one. Thomas Cribb was champion of England from 1805 to 1820. One of Cribb's greatest fights was with Jem Belcher in 1807, when, in the forty-first and last round, as we are told by the chroniclers, 'Cribb proving the stronger man put in two weak blows, when Belcher, quite exhausted, fell upon the ropes and gave up the combat.' Cribb had a prolonged career of glory, but he died in poverty in 1848. Happier was an earlier champion, John Gully, who held the glorious honour for three years—from 1805 to 1808. Gully turned tavern-keeper, and making a fortune out of sundry speculations, entered Parliament as member for Pontefract, and lived to be eighty years of age.

It is necessary to dwell upon Borrow as the friend of prize-fighters, because no one understands Borrow who does not realise that his real interests were not in literature but in action. He would have liked to join the army but could not obtain a commission. And so[Pg 132] he had to be content with such fighting as was possible. He cared more for the men who could use their fists than for those who could but wield the pen. He would, we may be sure, have rejoiced to know that many more have visited the tomb of Tom Sayers in Highgate Cemetery than have visited the tomb of George Eliot in the same burial-ground. A curious moral obliquity this, you may say. But to recognise it is to understand one side of Borrow, and an interesting side withal.

[Pg 133]

CHAPTER XIII

EIGHT YEARS OF VAGABONDAGE

There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the 'veiled period' of George Borrow's life. This has arisen from a letter which Richard Ford of the Handbook for Travellers in Spain wrote to Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his projected Lavengro, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success. Was not The Bible in Spain passing merrily from edition to edition! Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his 'Autobiography'—he had no misgiving then as to what he should call it—and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. Ford begged him, in letters that came into Dr. Knapp's possession, and from which he quotes all too meagrely, not to 'drop a curtain' over the eight years succeeding 1825. 'No doubt,' says Ford, 'it will excite a mysterious interest,' but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough time during these eight years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It seems a small matter to us[Pg 134] now that Charles Dickens should have been ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a right to a penurious, and even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no right to a sordid manhood, and here was George 'Olaus' Borrow, who was able to claim the friendship of William Taylor, the German scholar; who was able to boast of his association with sound scholastic foundations, with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years; should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly have been in prison as a common tramp.[80] It was all very well to romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there ceased to be romance, and only sordidness was forthcoming. From his twenty-third to his thirty-first year George Borrow was engaged in a hopeless quest for the means of making a living. There is, however, very little mystery. Many incidents of each of these years are revealed at one or other point. His home, to which he returned from time to time, was with his mother at the cottage in Willow Lane, Norwich. Whether he made sufficient profit out of a horse, as in The Romany Rye, to enable him to travel upon the proceeds, as Dr. Knapp thinks, we cannot say. Dr. Knapp is doubtless right in assuming that during this period he led 'a life of roving adventure,' his own authorised version of his career at the time, as we have quoted from the biography in his handwriting from Men of the Time. But[Pg 135] how far this roving was confined to England, how far it extended to other lands, we do not know. We are, however, satisfied that he starved through it all, that he rarely had a penny in his pocket. At a later date he gave it to be understood at times that he had visited the East, and that India had revealed her glories to him. We do not believe it. Defoe was Borrow's master in literature, and he shared Defoe's right to lie magnificently on occasion. Dr. Knapp has collected the various occasions upon which Borrow referred to his supposed earlier travels abroad prior to his visit to St. Petersburg in 1833. The only quotation that carries conviction is an extract from a letter to his mother from St. Petersburg, where he writes of 'London, Paris, Madrid, and other capitals which I have visited.' I am not, however, disinclined to accept Dr. Knapp's theory that in 1826-7 Borrow did travel to Paris and through certain parts of Southern Europe. It is strange, all the same, that adventures which, had they taken place, would have provoked a thousand observations, provoked but two or three passing references. Yet there is no getting over that letter to his mother, nor that reference in The Gypsies of Spain, where he says—'Once in the south of France, when I was weary, hungry, and penniless....' Borrow certainly did some travel in these years, but it was sordid, lacking in all dignity—never afterwards to be recalled. For the most part, however, he was in England. We know that Borrow was in Norwich in 1826, for we have seen him superintending the publication of the Romantic Ballads by subscription in that year. In that year also he wrote the letter to Haydon, the painter, to say that he was ready to sit for him, but that he was 'going to the south of France in a little better than a[Pg 136] fortnight.'[81] We know also that he was in Norwich in 1827, because it was then, and not in 1818 as described in Lavengro, that he 'doffed his hat' to the famous trotting stallion Marshland Shales, when that famous old horse was exhibited at Tombland Fair on the Castle Hill. We meet him next as the friend of Dr. Bowring. The letters to Bowring we must leave to another chapter, but they commence in 1829 and continue through 1830 and 1831. Through them all Borrow shows himself alive to the necessity of obtaining an appointment of some kind, and meanwhile he is hard at work upon his translations from various languages, which, in conjunction with Dr. Bowring, he is to issue as Songs of Scandinavia. Dr. Knapp thinks that in 1829 he made the translation of the Memoirs of Vidocq, which appeared in that year with a short preface by the translator.[82] But these little volumes bear no internal evidence of Borrow's style, and there is no external evidence to support the assumption that he had a hand in their publication. His occasional references to Vidocq are probably due to the fact that he had read this little book.

I have before me one very lengthy manuscript of Borrow's of this period. It is dated December 1829,[Pg 137] and is addressed, 'To the Committee of the Honourable and Praiseworthy Association, known by the name of the Highland Society.'[83] It is a proposal that they should publish in two thick octavo volumes a series of translations of the best and most approved poetry of the ancient and modern Scots-Gaelic bards. Borrow was willing to give two years to the project, for which he pleads 'with no sordid motive.' It is a dignified letter, which will be found in one of Dr. Knapp's appendices—so presumably Borrow made two copies of it. The offer was in any case declined, and so Borrow passed from disappointment to disappointment during these eight years, which no wonder he desired, in the coming years of fame and prosperity, to veil as much as possible. The lean years in the lives of any of us are not those upon which we delight to dwell, or upon which we most cheerfully look back.[84]

[Pg 138]

CHAPTER XIV

SIR JOHN BOWRING

'Poor George.... I wish he were making money. He works hard and remains poor'—thus wrote John Borrow to his mother in 1830 from Mexico, and it disposes in a measure of any suggestion of mystery with regard to five of those years that he wished to veil. They were not spent, it is clear, in rambling in the East, as he tried to persuade Colonel Napier many years later. They were spent for the most part in diligent attempt at the capture of words, in reading the poetry and the prose of many lands, and in making translations of unequal merit from these diverse tongues. This is indisputably brought home to me by the manuscripts in my possession, supplemented by those that fell to Dr. Knapp. These manuscripts represent years of work. Borrow has been counted a considerable linguist, and he had assuredly a reading and speaking acquaintance with a great many languages. But this knowledge was acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience. I have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages. These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an old-fashioned system of education learns his Latin or French—by writing down simple words—'father,' 'mother,' 'horse,' 'dog,' and so on with[Pg 139] the same word in Latin or French in front of them. Of course Borrow had a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so he was enabled to add one language to another and to make his translations from such books as he could obtain, with varied success. I believe that nearly all the books that he handled came from the Norwich library, and when Mrs. Borrow wrote to her elder son to say that George was working hard, as we may fairly assume, from the reply quoted, that she did, she was recalling this laborious work at translation that must have gone on for years. We have seen the first fruit in the translation from the German—or possibly from the French—of Klinger's Faustus; we have seen it in Romantic Ballads from the Danish, the Irish, and the Swedish. Now there really seemed a chance of a more prosperous utilisation of his gift, for Borrow had found a zealous friend who was prepared to go forward with him in this work of giving to the English public translations from the literatures of the northern nations. This friend was Dr. John Bowring, who made a very substantial reputation in his day.

Bowring has told his own story in a volume of Autobiographical Recollections,[85] a singularly dull book for a man whose career was at once so varied and so full of interest. He was born at Exeter in 1792 of an old Devonshire family, and entered a merchant's office in his native city on leaving school. He early acquired a taste for the study of languages, and learnt French from a refugee priest precisely in the way in which Borrow had done. He also acquired Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, continuing with a great variety of other languages. Indeed, only the very year after[Pg 140] Borrow had published Faustus, he published his Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain, and the year after Borrow's Romantic Ballads came Bowring's Servian Popular Poetry. With such interest in common it was natural that the two men should be brought together, but Bowring had the qualities which enabled him to make a career for himself and Borrow had not. In 1811, as a clerk in a London mercantile house, he was sent to Spain, and after this his travels were varied. He was in Russia in 1820, and in 1822 was arrested at Calais and thrown into prison, being suspected by the Bourbon Government of abetting the French Liberals. Canning as Foreign Minister took up his cause, and he was speedily released. He assisted Jeremy Bentham in founding The Westminster Review in 1824. Meanwhile he was seeking official employment, and in conjunction with Mr. Villiers, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, and that ambassador to Spain who befriended Borrow when he was in the Peninsula, became a commissioner to investigate the commercial relations between England and France. After the Reform Bill of 1832 Bowring was frequently a candidate for Parliament, and was finally elected for Bolton in 1841. In the meantime he assisted Cobden in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. Having suffered great monetary losses in the interval, he applied for the appointment of Consul at Canton, of which place he afterwards became Governor, being knighted in 1854. At one period of his career at Hong Kong his conduct was made the subject of a vote of censure in Parliament, Lord Palmerston, however, warmly defending him. Finally returning to England in 1862, he continued his literary work with unfailing zest. He died at Exeter, in a house very near that in which he was born, in 1872. His extraordinary[Pg 141] energies cannot be too much praised, and there is no doubt but that in addition to being the possessor of great learning he was a man of high character. His literary efforts were surprisingly varied. There are at least thirty-six volumes with his name on the title-page, most of them unreadable to-day; even such works, for example, as his Visit to the Philippine Isles and Siam and the Siamese, which involved travel into then little-known lands. Perhaps the only book by him that to-day commands attention is his translation of Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl. The most readable of many books by him into which I have dipped is his Servian Popular Poetry of 1827, in which we find interesting stories in verse that remind us of similar stories from the Danish in Borrow's Romantic Ballads published only the year before. The extraordinary thing, indeed, is the many points of likeness between Borrow and Bowring. Both were remarkable linguists; both had spent some time in Spain and Russia; both had found themselves in foreign prisons. They were alike associated in some measure with Norwich—Bowring through friendship with Taylor—and I might go on to many other points of likeness or of contrast. It is natural, therefore, that the penniless Borrow should have welcomed acquaintance with the more prosperous scholar. Thus it is that, some thirty years later, Borrow described the introduction by Taylor:

The quarrels of authors are frequently amusing but rarely edifying, and this hatred of Bowring that possessed the soul of poor Borrow in his later years is of the same texture as the rest. We shall never know the facts, but the position is comprehensible enough. Let us turn to the extant correspondence[87] which, as far as we know, opened when Borrow paid what was probably his third visit to London in 1829:

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 6, 1829.]

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. [Dec. 28, 1829.][89]

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Decr. 31, 1829.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 14, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

17 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Jany. 7, 1830.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Jany. 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Jany. 25, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Feby. 20, 1830.

George Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, March 9, 1830.

George Borrow.

To this letter Bowring replied the same day, and his reply is preserved by Dr. Knapp. He promised to help in the Museum project 'by every sort of counsel and creation.' 'I should rejoice to see you nicked in the British Museum,' he concludes.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, Friday Evening, May 21, 1830.

G. Borrow.

This letter is printed in part by Dr. Knapp, and almost in its entirety by Mr. Herbert Jenkins. Dr. Knapp has much sound worldly reflection upon its pathetic reference to 'drifting on the sea of the world.' If only, he suggests, Borrow had not received that unwise eulogy from Allan Cunningham about his 'exquisite Danish ballads,' if only he had listened to Richard Ford's advice—which came too late in any case—'Avoid poetry and translations of poets'—how much better it would have been. But Borrow had not the makings in him of a 'successful' man, and we who enjoy his writings to-day must be contented with the reflection that he had just the kind of life-experience which gave us what he had to give. Here Borrow holds his place among the poets—an unhappy race. In any case the British Museum appointment was not for him, nor the military career. Had one or other fallen to his lot, we might have had much literary work[Pg 149] of a kind, but certainly not Lavengro. To return to the correspondence:

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum St., June 1, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum Street, June 7, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

7 Museum St., Sept. 14, 1830.

G. Borrow.

To Dr. John Bowring

Willow Lane, Norwich, Sept. 11, 1831.

George Borrow.

[Pg 152]

Borrow's next letter to Bowring that has been preserved is dated 1835 and was written from Portugal. With that I will deal when we come to Borrow's travels in the Peninsula. Here it sufficeth to note that during the years of Borrow's most urgent need he seems to have found a kind friend if not a very zealous helper in the 'Old Radical' whom he came to hate so cordially.

[Pg 153]

CHAPTER XV

BORROW AND THE BIBLE SOCIETY

That George Borrow should have become an agent for the Bible Society, then in the third decade of its flourishing career, has naturally excited doubts as to his moral honesty. The position was truly a contrast to an earlier ideal contained in the letter to his Norwich friend, Roger Kerrison, that we have already given, in which, with all the zest of a Shelley, he declares that he intends to live in London, 'write plays, poetry, etc., abuse religion, and get myself prosecuted.' But that was in 1824, and Borrow had suffered great tribulation in the intervening eight years. He had acquired many languages, wandered far and written much, all too little of which had found a publisher. There was plenty of time for his religious outlook to have changed in the interval, and in any case Borrow was no theologian. The negative outlook of 'Godless Billy Taylor,' and the positive outlook of certain Evangelical friends with whom he was now on visiting terms, were of small account compared with the imperative need of making a living—and then there was the passionate longing of his nature for a wider sphere—for travelling activity which should not be dependent alone upon the vagabond's crust. What matter if, as Harriet Martineau—most generous and also most malicious of women, with much kinship with Borrow in temperament—said,[Pg 154] that his appearance before the public as a devout agent of the Bible Society excited a 'burst of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days'; what matter if another 'scribbling woman,' as Carlyle called such strident female writers as were in vogue in mid-Victorian days—Frances Power Cobbe—thought him 'insincere'; these were unable to comprehend the abnormal heart of Borrow, so entirely at one with Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre:

Here was Borrow's opportunity indeed. Verily I believe that it would have been the same had it been a society for the propagation of the writings of Defoe among the Persians. With what zest would Borrow have undertaken to translate Moll Flanders and Captain Singleton into the languages of Hafiz and Omar! But the Bible Society was ready to his hand, and Borrow did nothing by halves. A good hater and a staunch friend, he was loyal to the Bible Society in no half-hearted way, and not the most pronounced[Pg 155] quarrel with forces obviously quite out of tune with his nature led to any real slackening of that loyalty. In the end a portion of his property went to swell the Bible Society's funds.[93]

When Borrow became one of its servants, the Bible Society was only in its third decade. It was founded in the year 1804, and had the names of William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and Zachary Macaulay on its first committee. To circulate the authorised version of the Bible without note or comment was the first ideal that these worthy men set before them; never to the entire satisfaction of the great printing organisations, which already had a considerable financial interest in such a circulation. For long years the words 'Sold under cost price' upon the Bibles of the Society excited mingled feelings among those interested in the book trade[94]. The Society's first idea was limited to Bibles in the English tongue. This was speedily modified. A Bible Society was set up in Nuremberg to which money was granted by the parent organisation. A Bible in the Welsh language was circulated broadcast through the Principality, and so the movement grew. From the first it had one of its principal centres in Norwich, where Joseph John Gurney's house was open to its committee, and at its annual gatherings at Earlham his sister Elizabeth Fry took a leading part, while Wilberforce, Charles Simeon, the famous preacher, and Legh Richmond, whose Dairyman's Daughter Borrow failed to appreciate, were of[Pg 156] the company. 'Uncles Buxton and Cunningham are here,' we find one of Joseph John Gurney's daughters writing in describing a Bible Society gathering. This was John Cunningham, rector of Harrow, and it was his brother who helped Borrow to his position in connection with the Society, as we shall see. At the moment of these early meetings Borrow is but a boy, meeting Joseph Gurney on the banks of the river near Earlham, and listening to his discourse upon angling. The work of the Bible Society in Russia may be said to have commenced when one John Paterson of Glasgow, who had been a missionary of the Congregational body, went to St. Petersburg during those critical months of 1812 that Napoleon was marching into Russia. Paterson indeed, William Canton tells us,[95] was 'one of the last to behold the old Tartar wall and high brick towers' and other splendours of the Moscow which in a month or two were to be consumed by the flames. Paterson was back again in St. Petersburg before the French were at the gates of Moscow, and it is noteworthy that while Moscow was burning and the Czar was on his way to join his army, this remarkable Scot was submitting to Prince Galitzin a plan for a Bible Society in St. Petersburg, and a memorial to the Czar thereon:

The Society was formed in January 1813, and when the Czar returned to St. Petersburg in 1815, after the shattering of Napoleon's power, he authorised a new translation of the Bible into modern Russian. From Russia it was not a far cry, where the spirit of evangelisation held sway, to Manchuria and to China. To these remote lands the Bible Society desired to send its literature. In 1822 the gospel of St. Matthew was printed in St. Petersburg in Manchu. Ten years later the type of the whole New Testament in that language was lying in the Russian capital. 'All that was required was a Manchu scholar to see the work through the press'.[97] Here came the chance for Borrow. At this period there resided at Oulton Hall, Suffolk, but a few miles from Norwich, a family of the name of Skepper, Edward and Anne his wife, with their two children, Breame and Mary. Mary married in 1817 one Henry Clarke, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He died a few months afterwards of consumption. Of this marriage there was a posthumous child, Henrietta Mary, born but two months after her father's death. Mary Clarke, as she now was, threw herself with zest into all the religious enthusiasms of the locality, and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, Vicar of St. Margaret's, Lowestoft, was one of her friends. Borrow had met Mary Clarke on one of his visits to Lowestoft, and she had doubtless been impressed with his fine presence, to say nothing of the intelligence and varied learning of the young man. The following note, the first communication[Pg 158] I can find from Borrow to his future wife, indicates how matters stood at the time:

To Mrs. Clarke

St. Giles, Norwich, 22 October 1832.

George Borrow.

That Borrow owed his introduction to Mr. Cunningham to Mrs. Clarke is clear, although Cunningham, in his letter to the Bible Society urging the claims of Borrow, refers to the fact that a 'young farmer' in the neighbourhood had introduced him. This was probably her brother, Breame Skepper. Dr. Knapp was of the opinion that Joseph John Gurney obtained Borrow his appointment, but the recently published correspondence of Borrow with the Bible Society makes it clear that Cunningham wrote—on 27th December 1832—recommending Borrow to the secretary, the Rev. Andrew Brandram. How little he knew of Borrow is indicated by the fact that he referred to him as 'independent in circumstances.' Brandram told Caroline Fox many years afterwards that Gurney had effected the introduction, but this was merely a lapse of memory. In fact we find Borrow asking to be allowed to meet Gurney before his departure. In any case he has himself told us, in one of the brief biographies of himself that he wrote, that he promptly walked to London, covering the whole distance of 112 miles[Pg 159] in twenty-seven hours, and that his expenses amounted to 5-1/2d. laid out in a pint of ale, a half-pint of milk, a roll of bread, and two apples. He reached London in the early morning, called at the offices of the Bible Society in Earl Street, and was kindly received by Andrew Brandram and Joseph Jowett, the two secretaries. He was asked if he would care to learn Manchu, and go to St. Petersburg. He was given six months for the task, and doubtless also some money on account. He returned to Norwich more luxuriously—by mail coach. In June 1833 we find a letter from Borrow to Jowett, dated from Willow Lane, Norwich, and commencing, 'I have mastered Manchu, and I should feel obliged by your informing the committee of the fact, and also my excellent friend, Mr. Brandram.' A long reply to this by Jowett is among my Borrow Papers, but the Bible Society clearly kept copies of its letters, and a portion of this one has been printed.[98] It shows that Borrow went through much heart-burning before his destiny was finally settled. At last he was again invited to London, and found himself as one of two candidates for the privilege of going to Russia. The examination consisted of a Manchu hymn, of which Borrow's version seems to have proved the more acceptable, and he afterwards printed it in his Targum. Finally, on the 5th of July 1833, Borrow received a letter from Jowett offering him the appointment, with a salary of £200 a year and expenses. The letter contained his first lesson in the then unaccustomed discipline of the Evangelical vocabulary. Borrow had spoken of the prospect of becoming 'useful to the Deity, to man, and to himself.'[Pg 160]

'Doubtless you meant,' commented Jowett, 'the prospect of glorifying God,' and Jowett frankly tells him that his tone of confidence in speaking of himself 'had alarmed some of the excellent members of our committee.' Borrow adapted himself at once, and is congratulated by Jowett in a later communication upon the 'truly Christian' spirit of his next letter.

By an interesting coincidence there was living in Norwich at the moment when Borrow was about to leave it, a man who had long identified himself with good causes in Russia, and had lived in that country for a considerable period of his life. John Venning[99] was born in Totnes in 1776, and he is buried in the Rosary Cemetery at Norwich, where he died in 1858, after twenty-eight years' residence in that city. He started for St. Petersburg four years after John Howard had died, ostensibly on behalf of the commercial house with which he was associated, but with the intention of carrying on the work of that great man in prison reform. Alexander I. was on the throne, and he made Venning his friend, frequently conversing with him upon religious subjects. He became the treasurer of a society for the humanising of Russian prisons; but when Nicholas became Czar in 1825 Venning's work became more difficult, although the Emperor was sympathetic. Venning returned to England in 1830, and thus opportunely, in 1833, was able to give his fellow-townsman letters of introduction to Prince Galitzin and other Russian notables, so that Borrow was able to set forth under the happiest auspices—with an entire[Pg 161] change of conditions from those eight years of semi-starvation that he was now to leave behind him for ever. Borrow left London for St. Petersburg on 31st July 1833, not forgetting to pay his mother before he left the £17 he had had to borrow during his time of stress. Always devoted to his mother, Borrow sent her sums of money at intervals from the moment the power of earning came to him. We shall never know, we can only surmise something of the self-sacrificing devotion of that mother during the years in which Borrow had failed to find remunerative work. Wherever he wandered there had always been a home in the Willow Lane cottage. It is probable that much the greater part of the period of his eight years of penury was spent under her roof. Yet we may be sure that the good mother never once reproached her son. She had just that touch of idealism in her character that made for faith and hope. In any case never more was Borrow to suffer penury, or to be a burden on his mother. Henceforth she was to be his devoted care to her dying day.

[Pg 162]

CHAPTER XVI

ST. PETERSBURG AND JOHN P. HASFELD

Borrow travelled by way of Hamburg and Lübeck to Travemünde, whence he went by sea to St. Petersburg, where he arrived on the twentieth of August 1833. He was back in London in September 1835, and thus it will be seen that he spent two years in Russia. After the hard life he had led, everything was now rose-coloured. 'Petersburg is the finest city in the world,' he wrote to Mr. Jowett; 'neither London nor Paris nor any other European capital which I have visited has sufficient pretensions to enter into comparison with it in respect to beauty and grandeur.' But the striking thing about Borrow in these early years was his capacity for making friends. He had not been a week in St. Petersburg before he had gained the regard of one, William Glen, who, in 1825, had been engaged by the Bible Society to translate the Old Testament into Persian. The clever Scot, of whom Borrow was informed by a competent judge that he was 'a Persian scholar of the first water,' was probably too heretical for the Society which recalled him, much to his chagrin. 'He is a very learned man, but of very simple and unassuming manners,' wrote Borrow to Jowett.[100] His[Pg 163] version of the Psalms appeared in 1830, and of Proverbs in 1831. Thus he was going home in despair, but seems to have had good talk on the way with Borrow in St. Petersburg. In 1845 his complete Old Testament in Persian appeared in Edinburgh. This William Glen has been confused with another William Glen, a law student, who taught Carlyle Greek, but they had nothing in common. Borrow and Carlyle could not possibly have had friends in common. Borrow was drawn towards this William Glen by his enthusiasm for the Persian language. But Glen departed out of his life very quickly. Hasfeld, who entered it about the same time, was to stay longer. Hasfeld was a Dane, now thirty-three years of age, who, after a period in the Foreign Office at Copenhagen, had come to St. Petersburg as an interpreter to the Danish Legation, but made quite a good income as a professor of European languages in cadet schools and elsewhere. The English language and literature would seem to have been his favourite topic. His friendship for Borrow was a great factor in Borrow's life in Russia and elsewhere. If Borrow's letters to Hasfeld should ever turn up, they will prove the best that he wrote. Hasfeld's letters to Borrow were preserved by him. Three of them are in my possession. Others were secured by Dr. Knapp, who made far too little use of them. They are all written in Danish on[Pg 164] foreign notepaper: flowery, grandiloquent productions we may admit, but if we may judge a man by his correspondents, we have a revelation of a more human Borrow than the correspondence with the friends at Earl Street reveals:

St. Petersburg, 6/18 November 1836.

J. P. Hasfeld.

St. Petersburg, 9th/21st July 1842.

J. P. H.

St. Petersburg, 26th April/8th May 1858.

John P. Hasfeld.[102]

[Pg 169]

CHAPTER XVII

THE MANCHU BIBLE—TARGUM—THE TALISMAN

The Bible Society wanted the Bible to be set up in the Manchu language, the official language of the Chinese Court and Government. A Russian scholar named Lipóftsof, who had spent twenty years in China, undertook in 1821 to translate the New Testament into Manchu for £560. Lipóftsof had done his work in 1826, and had sent two manuscript copies to London. In 1832 the Rev. William Swan of the London Missionary Society in passing through St. Petersburg discovered a transcript of a large part of the Old and New Testament in Manchu, made by one Pierot, a French Jesuit, many years before. This transcript was unavailable, but a second was soon afterwards forthcoming for free publication if a qualified Manchu scholar could be found to see it through the Press. Mr. Swan's communication of these facts to the Bible Society in London gave Borrow his opportunity. It was his task to find the printers, buy the paper, and hire the qualified compositors for setting the type. It must be admitted Borrow worked hard for his £200 a year. First he had to ask the diplomatists for permission from the Russian Government, not now so friendly to British Missionary zeal. The Russian Bible Society had been suppressed in 1826. He succeeded here. Then he had to continue his[Pg 170] studies in the Manchu language. He had written from Norwich to Mr. Jowett on 9th June 1833, 'I have mastered Manchu,' but on 20th January 1834 we find him writing to the same correspondent: 'I pay about six shillings, English, for each lesson, which I grudge not, for the perfect acquirement of Manchu is one of my most ardent wishes.'[103] Then he found the printers—a German firm, Schultz and Beneze—who probably printed the two little books of Borrow's own for him as a 'make weight.' He purchased paper for his Manchu translation with an ability that would have done credit to a modern newspaper manager. Every detail of these transactions is given in his letters to the Bible Society, and one cannot but be amused at Borrow's explanation to the Reverend Secretary of the little subterfuges by which he proposed to 'best' the godless for the benefit of the godly:

Then came the composing or setting up of the type of the book. When Borrow was called to account by his London employers, who were not sure whether he was wasting time, he replied: 'I have been working in the printing-office, as a common compositor, between ten and thirteen hours every day.' In another letter Borrow records further difficulties with the printers after the composition had been effected. Several of[Pg 171] the working printers, it appears, 'went away in disgust,' Then he adds:

It is not my intention to add materially to the letters of Borrow from Russia and from Spain that have already been published, although many are in my possession. They reveal an aspect of the life of Borrow that has been amply dealt with by other biographers, and it is an aspect that interests me but little. Here, however, is one hitherto unpublished letter that throws much light upon Borrow's work at this time:

To the Rev. Andrew Brandram

St. Petersburg, 18th Oct. 1833.

George Borrow.

When the work was done at so great a cost of money,[107] and of energy and enthusiasm on the part of George Borrow, it was found that the books were useless. Most of these New Testaments were afterwards sent out to China, and copies distributed by the missionaries there as opportunities offered. It was found, however, that the Manchus in China were able to read Chinese, preferring it to their own language, which indeed had become almost confined to official use.[108] In the year[Pg 174] 1859 editions of St. Matthew and St. Mark were published in Manchu and Chinese side by side, the Manchu text being a reprint of that edited by Borrow, and these books are still in use in Chinese Turkestan. But Borrow had here to suffer one of the many disappointments of his life. If not actually a gypsy he had all a gypsy's love of wandering. No impartial reader of the innumerable letters of this period can possibly claim that there was in Borrow any of the proselytising zeal or evangelical fervour which wins for the names of Henry Martyn and of David Livingstone so much honour and sympathy even among the least zealous. At the best Borrow's zeal for religion was of the order of Dr. Keate, the famous headmaster of Eton—'Blessed are the pure in heart ... if you are not pure in heart, by God, I'll flog you!' Borrow had got his New Testaments printed, and he wanted to distribute them because he wished to see still more of the world, and had no lack of courage to carry out any well defined scheme of the organisation which was employing him. Borrow had thrown out constant hints in his letters home. People had suggested to him, he said, that he was printing Testaments for which he would never find readers. If you wish for readers, they had said to him, 'you must seek them among the natives of Pekin and the fierce hordes of desert Tartary.' And it was this last most courageous thing that Borrow proposed. Let him, he said to Mr. Jowett, fix his headquarters at Kiachta upon the northern frontier of China. The Society should have an agent there:

The Bible Committee considered this and other plans through the intervening months, and it seems clear that at the end they would have sanctioned some form of missionary work for Borrow in the Chinese Empire; but on 1st June 1835 he wrote to say that the Russian Government, solicitous of maintaining good relations with China, would not grant him a passport across Siberia except on the condition that he carried not one single Manchu Bible thither.[110] And so Borrow's dreams were left unfulfilled. He was never to see China or the farther East, although, because he was a dreamer and like his hero, Defoe, a bit of a liar, he often said he had. In September 1835 he was back in England awaiting in his mother's home in Norwich further commissions from his friends of the Bible Society.

Work on the Manchu New Testament did not entirely absorb Borrow's activities in St. Petersburg. He seems to have made a proposition to another organisation, as the following letter indicates. The proposal does not appear to have borne any fruit:

Prayer Book and Homily Society,
No. 4 Exeter Hall, London, January 16th, 1835.

C. R. Pritchett.

[Pg 177]

During Borrow's last month or two in St. Petersburg he printed two thin octavo volumes of translations—some of them verses which, undeterred by the disheartening reception of earlier efforts, he had continued to make from each language in succession that he had the happiness to acquire, although most of the poems are from his old portfolios. These little books were named Targum and The Talisman. Dr. Knapp calls the latter an appendix to the former. They are absolutely separate volumes of verse, and I reproduce their title-pages from the only copies that Borrow seems to have reserved for himself out of the hundred printed of each. The publishers, it will be seen, are the German firm that printed the Manchu New Testament, Schultz and Beneze. Borrow's preface to Targum is dated 'St. Petersburg, June 1, 1835.' Here in Targum we find the trial poem which in competition with a rival candidate had won him the privilege of going to Russia for the Bible Society—The Mountain Chase. Here also among new verses are some from the Arabic, the Persian, and the Turkish. If it be true, as his friend Hasfeld said, that here was a poet who was able to render another without robbing the garland of a single leaf—that would but prove that the poetry which Borrow rendered was not of the first order. Nor, taking another standard—the capacity to render the ballad with a force that captures 'the common people,'—can we agree with William Bodham Donne, who was delighted with Targum and said that 'the language and rhythm are vastly superior to Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.' In The Talisman we have four little poems from the Russian of Pushkin followed by another poem, The Mermaid, by the same author. Three other poems in Russian and Polish complete the booklet. Borrow[Pg 178] left behind him in St. Petersburg with his friend, Hasfeld, a presentation copy for Pushkin, who, when he received it, expressed regret that he had not met his translator while Borrow was in St. Petersburg.

Title Page from "Targum"

Title Page from "The Talisman"

[Pg 179]

CHAPTER XVIII

THREE VISITS TO SPAIN

From his journey to Russia Borrow had acquired valuable experience, but nothing in the way of fame, although his mother had been able to record in a letter to St. Petersburg that she had heard at a Bible Society gathering in Norwich his name 'sounded through the hall' by Mr. Joseph John Gurney and Mr. Cunningham, to her great delight. 'All this is very pleasing to me,' she said, 'God bless you!' Even more pleasing to Borrow must have been a letter from Mary Clarke, his future wife, who was able to tell him that she heard Francis Cunningham refer to him as 'one of the most extraordinary and interesting individuals of the present day.' But these tributes were not all-satisfying to an ambitious man, and this Borrow undoubtedly was. His Russian journey was followed by five weeks of idleness in Norwich varied by the one excitement of attending a Bible meeting at Oulton with the Reverend Francis Cunningham in the chair, when 'Mr. George Borrow from Russia'[111] made one of the usual conventional missionary speeches, Mary Clarke's brother, Breame Skepper, being also among the orators. Borrow begged for more work from the Society. He urged the desirability of carrying out its own idea of an[Pg 180] investigation in Portugal and perhaps also in Spain, and hinted that he could write a small volume concerning what he saw and heard which might cover the expense of the expedition.[112] So much persistency conquered. Borrow sailed from London on 6th November 1835, and reached Lisbon on 12th November, this his first official visit to the Peninsula lasting exactly eleven months. The next four years and six months were to be spent mainly in Spain.[113] Broadly the time divides itself in the following fashion:

[Pg 181]

What a world of adventure do the mere names of these places call up. Borrow entered the Peninsula at an exciting period of its history. Traces of the Great War in which Napoleon's legions faced those of Wellington still abounded. Here and there a bridge had disappeared, and some of Borrow's strange experiences on ferry-boats were indirectly due to the results of Napoleon's ambition.[114] Everywhere there was still war in the land. Portugal indeed had just passed through a revolution. The partisans of the infant Queen Maria II. had been fighting with her uncle Dom Miguel for eight years, and it was only a few short months before Borrow landed at Lisbon that Maria had become undisputed queen. Spain, to which Borrow speedily betook himself, was even in a worse state. She was in the throes of a six years' war. Queen Isabel II., a child of three, reigned over a chaotic country with her mother Dona Christina as regent; her uncle Don Carlos was a formidable claimant to the throne and had the support of the absolutist and clerical parties. Borrow's political sympathies were always in the direction of absolutism; but in religion, although a staunch Church of England man, he was certainly an anti-clerical one in Roman Catholic Spain.[Pg 182] In any case he steered judiciously enough between contending factions, describing the fanatics of either side with vigour and sometimes with humour. Mr. Brandram's injunction to Borrow 'to be on his guard against becoming too much committed to one particular party' seems to have been unnecessary.

Borrow's three expeditions to Spain have more to be said for them than had his journey to St. Petersburg. The work of the Bible Society was and is at its highest point of human service when distributing either the Old or the New Testament in Christian countries, Spain, England, or another. Few there be to-day in any country who, in the interests of civilisation, would deny to the Bible a wider distribution. In a remote village of Spain a Bible Society's colporteur, carrying a coloured banner, sold me a copy of Cipriano de Valera's New Testament for a peseta. The villages of Spain that Borrow visited could even at that time compare favourably morally and educationally, with the villages of his own county of Norfolk at the same period. The morals of the agricultural labourers of the English fen country eighty years ago were a scandal, and the peasantry read nothing; more than half of them could not read. They had not, moreover, the humanising passion for song and dance that Andalusia knew. But this is not to deny that the Bible Society under Borrow's instrumentality did a good work in Spain, nor that they did it on the whole in a broad and generous way. Borrow admits that there was a section of the Roman Catholic clergy 'favourably disposed towards the circulation of the Gospel,'[115] and the Society actually fixed upon a Roman Catholic version of the Spanish Bible, that by[Pg 183] Scio de San Miguel,[116] although this version Borrow considered a bad translation. Much has been said about the aim of the Bible Society to provide the Bible without notes or comment—in its way a most meritorious aim, although then as now opposed to the instinct of a large number of the priests of the Roman Church. It is true that their attitude does not in any way possess the sanction of the ecclesiastical authorities. It may be urged, indeed, that the interpretation of the Bible by a priest, usually of mature judgment, and frequently of a higher education than the people with whom he is associated, is at least as trustworthy as its interpretation at the hands of very partially educated young women and exceedingly inadequately equipped young men who to-day provide interpretation and comment in so many of the Sunday Schools of Protestant countries.[117]

Behold George Borrow, then, first in Portugal and a little later in Spain, upon his great mission—avowedly at first a tentative mission—rather to see what were the prospects for Bible distribution than to distribute Bibles. But Borrow's zeal knew no such limitations. Before very long he had a shop in one of the principal streets of Madrid—the Calle del Principe—much more[Pg 184] in the heart of things than the very prosperous Bible Society of our day ventures upon.[118] Meanwhile he is at present in Portugal not very certain of his movements, and he writes to his old friend Dr. Bowring the following letter with a request with which Bowring complied, although in the coldest manner:[Pg 185]

To Dr. John Bowring.

Evora in the Alemtejo, 27 Decr. 1835.

Mr. George Borrow,
to the care of Mr. Wilby,
Rua Dos Restauradores, Lisbon.

G. Borrow.

During this eleven months' stay in the Peninsula Borrow made his way to Madrid, and here he interviewed the British Minister, Sir George Villiers, afterwards fourth Earl of Clarendon, and had received a quite remarkable encouragement from him for the publication and distribution of the Bible. He also interviewed the Spanish Prime Minister, Mendizábal, 'whom it is as difficult to get nigh as it is to approach the North Pole,' and he has given us a picturesque account of the interview in The Bible in Spain. It was agreed that 5000 copies of the Spanish Testament were to be reprinted from Scio's text at the expense of the Bible Society, and all these Borrow was to handle as he thought fit. Then Borrow made his way to Granada, where, under date 30th August 1836, his autograph may be read in the visitors' book of the Alhambra:

George Borrow Norvicensis.

Here he studied his friends the gypsies, now and probably then, as we may assume from his Zincali, the sordid scum on the hillside of that great city, but now more assuredly than then unutterably demoralised by the numerous but curious tourists who visit this rabble under police protection, the very policeman or gendarme not despising a peseta for his protective services. But Borrow's hobbies included the Romanies of every land, and a year later he produced and published[Pg 187] a gypsy version of the Gospel of St. Luke.[119] In October 1836 Borrow was back in England. He found that the Bible Society approved of him. In November of the same year he left London for Cadiz on his second visit to Spain. The journey is described in The Bible in Spain;[120] but here, from my Borrow Papers, is a kind letter that Mr. Brandram wrote to Borrow's mother on the occasion:

PORTION OF A LETTER FROM GEORGE BORROW TO THE REV. SAMUEL BRANDRAM.

[Pg 188]

No. 10 EAST STREET, Jany. 11, 1837.

A. Brandram.
Mrs. Borrow, Norwich.

A brilliant letter from Seville followed soon after, and then he went on to Madrid, not without many adventures. 'The cold nearly killed me,' he said. 'I swallowed nearly two bottles of brandy; it affected me no more than warm water.' This to kindly Mr. Brandram, who clearly had no teetotaller proclivities, for the letter, as he said, 'filled his heart with joy and gladness.' Meanwhile those five thousand copies of the New Testament were a-printing, Borrow superintending the work with the assistance of a new friend, Dr. Usóz. 'As soon as the book is printed and issued,' he tells Mr. Brandram, 'I will ride forth from Madrid into the wildest parts of Spain, ...' and so, after some correspondence with the Society which is quite entertaining, he did. The reader of The Bible in Spain will note some seventy separate towns and villages that Borrow[Pg 189] visited, not without countless remarkable adventures on the way. 'I felt some desire,' he says in The Romany Rye, 'to meet with one of those adventures which upon the roads of England are generally as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.' Assuredly in this tour of Spanish villages Borrow met with no lack of adventures. The committee of the Bible Society authorised this tour in March 1837, and in May Borrow started off on horseback attended by his faithful servant, Antonio. This tour was to last five months, and 'if I am spared,' he writes to his friend Hasfeld, 'and have not fallen a prey to sickness, Carlists, banditti, or wild beasts, I shall return to Madrid.' He hopes a little later, he tells Hasfeld, to be sent to China. We have then a glimpse of his servant, the excellent Antonio, which supplements that contained in The Bible of Spain. 'He is inordinately given to drink, and is of so quarrelsome a disposition that he is almost constantly involved in some broil.'[121] Not all his weird experiences were conveyed in his letters to the Bible Society's secretary. Some of these letters, however—the more highly coloured ones—were used in The Bible in Spain, word for word, and wonderful reading they must have made for the secretary, who indeed asked for more, although, with a view to keeping Borrow humble—an impossible task—Mr. Brandram takes occasion to say 'Mr. Graydon's letters, as well as yours, are deeply interesting,' Graydon being a hated rival, as we shall see. The question of L.S.D. was also not forgotten by the assiduous secretary. 'I know you are no accountant,' he writes, 'but do not forget there are some who are,' and a financial document was forwarded to Borrow about this time which we reproduce in facsimile.[Pg 190]

FACSIMILE OF AN ACCOUNT OF GEORGE BORROW'S EXPENSES IN SPAIN MADE OUT BY THE BIBLE SOCIETY

But now Borrow was happy, for next to the adventures of five glorious months in the villages between Madrid and Coruña nothing could be more to the taste of Borrow than a good wholesome quarrel. He was imprisoned by order of the Spanish Government[Pg 191] and released on the intervention of the British Embassy.[122] He tells the story so graphically in The Bible in Spain that it is superfluous to repeat it; but here he does not tell of the great quarrel with regard to Lieutenant Graydon that led him to attack that worthy zealot in a letter to the Bible Society. This attack did indeed cause the Society to recall Graydon, whose zealous proclamation of anti-Romanism must however have been more to the taste of some of its subscribers than Borrow's trimming methods. Moreover, Graydon worked for love of the cause and required no salary, which must always have been in his favour. Borrow was ten days in a Madrid prison, and there, as ever, he had extraordinary adventures if we may believe his own narrative, but they are much too good to be torn from their context. Suffice to say here that in the actual correspondence we find breezy controversy between Borrow and the Society. Borrow thought that the secretary had called the accuracy of his statements in question as to this or that particular in his conduct. Ever a fighter, he appealed to the British Embassy for confirmation of his word, and finally Mr. Brandram suggested he should come back to England for a time and talk matters over with the members of the committee. In the beginning of September 1838 Borrow was again in England, when he issued a lengthy and eloquent defence of his conduct and a report on 'Past and Future Operations in Spain.'[123] In December of[Pg 192] the same year Borrow was again on his way to Cadiz upon his third and last visit to Spain.

Borrow reached Cadiz on this his last visit on 31st December 1838, and went straight to Seville, where he arrived on 2nd January 1839. Here he took a beautiful little house, 'a paradise in its way,' in the Plazuela de la Pila Seca, and furnished it—clearly at the expense of his friend Mrs. Clarke of Oulton, who must have sent him a cheque for the purpose. He had been corresponding regularly with Mrs. Clarke, who had told him of her difficulties with lawyers and relatives, and Borrow had advised her to cut the Gordian knot and come to Spain. But Mrs. Clarke and her daughter, Henrietta, did not arrive from England until June.

In the intervening months Borrow had been working more in his own interests than in those of the patient Bible Society, for he started to gather material for his Gypsies of Spain, and this book was for the most part actually written in Seville. It was at this period that he had the many interviews with Colonel Elers Napier that we quote at length in our next chapter.

A little later he is telling Mr. Brandram of his adventure with the blind girl of Manzanares who could talk in the Latin tongue, which she had been taught by a Jesuit priest, an episode which he retold in The Bible in Spain. 'When shall we hear,' he asks, 'of an English rector instructing a beggar girl in the language of Cicero?' To which Mr. Brandram, who was rector of Beckenham, replied 'Cui bono?' The letters of this period are the best that he ever wrote, and are incorporated more exactly than the earlier ones in The Bible in Spain.

[Pg 192a]

WHERE BORROW LIVED IN MADRID

The house of Maria Diaz in the Calle del Santiago. Borrow occupied the third floor front. A laundry is now in possession.

THE CALLE DEL PRINCIPE, MADRID

Where Borrow opened a shop for the sale of New Testaments, which was finally closed by order of the Government.

[Pg 193]

Four letters to his mother within the period of his second and third Spanish visits may well be presented together here from my Borrow Papers:

To Mrs. Ann Borrow

Madrid, July 27, 1838.

G. B.

To Mrs. Ann Borrow, Willow Lane, St. Giles, Norwich (Inglaterra)

Madrid, August 5, 1838.

[Pg 194]

George Borrow.

To Mrs. Ann Borrow

(No date.)

G. B.

It was in the middle of his third and last visit to Spain that Borrow wrote this next letter to his mother which gives the first suggestion of the romantic and happy termination of his final visit to the Peninsula:

To Mrs. Ann Borrow

Seville, Spain, April 27, 1839.

George Borrow.

Borrow had need of friends more tolerant of his idiosyncrasies than the 'powerful friends' he describes to his mother, for the Secretary of the Bible Society was still in a critical mood:—

On 29th July 1839 Borrow was instructed by his Committee to return to England, but he was already on the way to Tangier, whence in September he wrote a long and interesting letter to Mr. Brandram, which was afterwards incorporated in The Bible in Spain. He had left Mrs. Clarke and her daughter in Seville, and they joined him at Gibraltar later. We find him en route for Tangier, staying two days with Mr. John M. Brackenbury, the British Consul in Cadiz, who found him a most fascinating man.

His Tangier life is fully described in The Bible in Spain. Here he picked up a Jewish youth, Hayim Ben Attar, who returned to Spain as his servant, and afterwards to England.

Borrow, at the end of September, was back again in Seville, in his house near the cathedral, in the[Pg 197] Plazuela de la Pila Seca, which, when I visited Seville in the spring of this year (1913), I found had long been destroyed to make way for new buildings. Here he received the following letter from Mr. George Browne of the Bible Society:—

To Mr. Borrow

Bible House, Oct. 7, 1839.

G. Browne.

'Where is Borrow?' asked the Bible Society meanwhile of the Consuls at Seville and Cadiz, but Borrow had ceased to care. He hoped to become a successful author with his Gypsies; he would at any rate secure independence by marriage, which must have been already mooted. In November he and Mrs. Clarke[Pg 198] were formally betrothed, and would have been married in Spain, but a Protestant marriage was impossible there. When preparing to leave Seville he had one of those fiery quarrels, with which his life was to be studded. This time it was with an official of the city over a passport, and the official promptly locked him up, for thirty hours. Hence the following letter in response to his complaint. The writer is Mr., afterwards Sir, George Jerningham, then Secretary of Legation at Madrid, who it may be mentioned came from Costessey, four miles from Norwich. It is written from the British Legation, and is dated 23rd December 1839:

Borrow was still in Seville, hard at work upon the Gypsies, all through the first three months of the year 1840. In April the three friends left Cadiz for London. A letter of this period from Mr. Brackenbury, the British Consul at Cadiz, is made clear by these facts:

To George Borrow, Esq.

British Consulate, Cadiz, January 27th, 1840.

J. M. Brackenbury.

[Pg 201]

CHAPTER XIX

BORROW'S SPANISH CIRCLE

There are many interesting personalities that pass before us in Borrow's three separate narratives,[125] as they may be considered, of his Spanish experiences. We would fain know more concerning the two excellent secretaries of the Bible Society—Samuel Brandram and Joseph Jowett. We merely know that the former was rector of Beckenham and was one of the Society's secretaries until his death in 1850;[126] that the latter was rector of Silk Willoughby in Lincolnshire, and belonged to the same family as Jowett of Balliol. But there are many quaint characters in Borrow's own narrative to whom we are introduced. There is Maria Diaz, for example, his landlady in the house in the Calle de Santiago in Madrid, and her husband, Juan Lopez, also assisted Borrow in his Bible distribution. Very eloquent are Borrow's tributes to the pair in the pages of The Bible in Spain. 'Honour to Maria Diaz, the quiet, dauntless, clever, Castilian female! I were an ungrate not to speak well of her,' We get a glimpse of Maria and her husband long years afterwards when a pensioner in a Spanish[Pg 202] almshouse revealed himself as the son of Borrow's friends. Eduardo Lopez was only eight years of age when Borrow was in Madrid, and he really adds nothing to our knowledge.[127] Then there were those two incorrigible vagabonds—Antonio Buchini, his Greek servant with an Italian name, and Benedict Mol, the Swiss of Lucerne, who turns up in all sorts of improbable circumstances as the seeker of treasure in the Church of St. James of Compostella—only a masterly imagination could have made him so interesting. Concerning these there is nothing to supplement Borrow's own story. But we have attractive glimpses of Borrow in the frequently quoted narrative of Colonel Napier,[128] and this is so illuminating that I venture to reproduce it at greater length than previous biographers have done. Edward Elers Napier, who was born in 1808, was the son of one Edward Elers of the Royal Navy. His widow married the famous Admiral Sir Charles Napier, who adopted her four children by her first husband. Edward Elers, the younger, or Edward Napier, as he came to be called, was educated at Sandhurst and entered the army, serving for some years in India. Later his regiment was ordered to Gibraltar, and it was thence that he made several sporting excursions into Spain and Morocco. Later he served in Egypt, and when, through ill-health, he retired in 1843 on half-pay, he lived for some years in Portugal. In 1854 he returned to the army and did good work in the Crimea, becoming a lieutenant-general in 1864. He died in 1870. He[Pg 203] wrote, in addition to these Excursions, several other books, including Scenes and Sports in Foreign Lands.[129] It was during his military career at Gibraltar that he met George Borrow at Seville, as the following extracts from his book testify. Borrow's pretension to have visited the East is characteristic—and amusing:—

The next most interesting figure in the Borrow gallery of this period is Don Luis de Usóz y Rio, who was a good friend to Borrow during the whole of his sojourn in Spain. It was he who translated Borrow's appeal to the Spanish Prime Minister to be permitted to distribute Scio's New Testament. He watched over Borrow with brotherly solicitude, and wrote him more than one excellent letter, of which the two following from my Borrow Papers, the last written at the close of the Spanish period, are the most interesting:

To Mr. George Borrow

(Translated from the Spanish)

Piazza di Spagna 17, Rome, 7 April 1838.

Luis de Usóz Y Rio.

To Mr. George Borrow

(Translated from the Spanish)

Naples, 28 August 1839.

Eleutheros.
[Pg 210]

Yet another acquaintance of these Spanish days was Baron Taylor—Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor, to give him his full name—who had a career of wandering achievement, with Government pay, that must have appealed to Borrow. Although his father was an Englishman he became a naturalised Frenchman, and he was for a time in the service of the French Government as Director of the Théâtre Français, when he had no little share in the production of the dramas of Victor Hugo and Dumas. Later he was instrumental in bringing the Luxor obelisk from Egypt to Paris. He wrote books upon his travels in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.[133] He wandered all over Europe in search of art treasures for the French Government, and may very well have met Borrow again and again. Borrow tells us that he had met Taylor in France, in Russia, and in Ireland, before he met him in Andalusia, collecting pictures for the French Government. Borrow's description of their meetings is inimitable:—

[Pg 211]

A LETTER FROM SIR GEORGE VILLIERS, AFTERWARDS EARL OF CLARENDON, BRITISH MINISTER TO SPAIN, TO GEORGE BORROW

The last and most distinguished of Borrow's colleagues while in Spain was George Villiers, fourth Earl of Clarendon, whom we judge to have been in private life one of the most lovable men of his epoch. George Villiers was born in London in 1800, and was the grandson of the first Earl, Thomas Villiers, who received his title when holding office in Lord North's administration, but is best known from his association in diplomacy with Frederick the Great. His grandson[Pg 212] was born, as it were, into diplomacy, and at twenty years of age was an attaché to the British Embassy in St. Petersburg. Later he was associated with Sir John Bowring in negotiating a commercial treaty with France. In August 1833 he was sent as British Minister—'envoy extraordinary' he was called—to Madrid, and he had been two years in that seething-pot of Spanish affairs, with Christinos and Carlists at one another's throats, when Borrow arrived in the Peninsula. His influence was the greater with a succession of Spanish Prime Ministers in that in 1838 he had been largely instrumental in negotiating the quadruple alliance between England, France, Spain, and Portugal. In March 1839—exactly a year before Borrow took his departure—he resigned his position at Madrid, having then for some months exchanged the title of Sir George Villiers for that of Earl of Clarendon through the death of his uncle;[135] Borrow thereafter having to launch his various complaints and grievances at his successor, Mr.—afterwards Sir George—Jerningham, who, it has been noted, had his home in Norfolk, at Costessey, four miles from Norwich. Villiers returned to England with a great reputation, although his Spanish policy was attacked in the House of Lords. In that same year, 1839, he joined Lord Melbourne's administration as Lord Privy Seal, O'Connell at the time declaring that he ought to be made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, so sympathetic was he towards concession and conciliation in that then feverishly excited country. This office actually came to him in 1847, and he was Lord-Lieutenant through that dark period of Ireland's history, including the Famine, the[Pg 213] Young Ireland rebellion, and the Smith O'Brien rising. He pleased no one in Ireland. No English statesman could ever have done so under such ideals of government as England would have tolerated then, and for long years afterwards. The Whigs defended him, the Tories abused him, in their respective organs. He left Ireland in 1852 and was more than once mentioned as possible Prime Minister in the ensuing years. He was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Lord Aberdeen's Administration during the Crimean War, and he held the same office under Lord Palmerston, again under Earl Russell in 1865, and under Mr. Gladstone in 1868. He might easily have become Prime Minister. Greville in his Diary writes of Prince Albert's desire that he should succeed Lord John Russell, but Clarendon said that no power on earth would make him take that position. He said he could not speak, and had not had parliamentary experience enough. He died in 1870, leaving a reputation as a skilful diplomatist and a disinterested politician, if not that of a great statesman. He had twice refused the Governor-Generalship of India, and three times a marquisate.

Sir George Villiers seems to have been very courteous to Borrow during the whole of the time they were together in Spain. It would have been easy for him to have been quite otherwise. Borrow's Bible mission synchronised with a very delicate diplomatic mission of his own, and in a measure clashed with it. The government of Spain was at the time fighting the ultra-clericals. Physical and moral strife were rife in the land. Neither Royalists nor Carlists could be expected to sympathise with Borrow's schemes, which were fundamentally to attack their church. But[Pg 214] Villiers was at all times friendly, and, as far as he could be, helpful. Borrow seems to have had ready access to him, and he answered his many letters. He gave Borrow an opportunity of an interview with the formidable Prime Minister Mendizábal, and he interviewed another minister and persuaded him to permit Borrow to print and circulate his Bibles. He intervened successfully to release Borrow from his Madrid prison. But Villiers could not have had any sympathy with Borrow other than as a British subject to be protected on the Roman citizen principle. We do not suppose that when The Bible in Spain appeared he was one of those who were captivated by its extraordinary qualities. When Borrow crossed his path in later life he received no special consideration, such as would be given very promptly in our day by a Cabinet minister to a man of letters of like distinction. We find him on one occasion writing to the ex-minister, now Lord Clarendon, asking his help for a consulship. Clarendon replied kindly enough, but sheltered himself behind the statement that the Prime Minister was overwhelmed with applications for patronage. Yet Clarendon, who held many high offices in the following years, might have helped if he had cared to do so. Some years later—in 1847—there was further correspondence when Borrow desired to become a Magistrate of Suffolk. Here again Clarendon wrote three courteous letters, and appears to have done his best in an unenthusiastic way. But nothing came of it all.

[Pg 215]

CHAPTER XX

MARY BORROW

Among the many Borrow manuscripts in my possession I find a page of unusual pathos. It is the inscription that Borrow wrote for his wife's tomb, and it is in the tremulous handwriting of a man weighed down by the one incomparable tragedy of life's pilgrimage:

The death of his wife saddened Borrow, and assisted to transform him into the unamiable creature of Norfolk tradition. But it is well to bear in mind, when we are considering Borrow on his domestic and personal side, that he was unquestionably a good and devoted husband throughout his married life of twenty-nine years. It was in the year 1832 that Borrow and his wife first met. He was twenty-nine; she was a widow of thirty-six. She was undeniably very intelligent, and was keenly sympathetic to the young vagabond of wonderful adventures on the highways of England, now so ambitious for future adventure in distant lands. Her maiden name was Mary Skepper. She was one of the two children of Edmund Skepper and his wife Anne,[Pg 216] who lived at Oulton Hall in Suffolk, whither they had removed from Beceles in 1805. Mary's brother inherited the Oulton Hall estate of three hundred acres, and she had a mortgage the interest of which yielded £450 per annum. In July 1817 Mary married, at Oulton Church, Henry Clarke,[136] a lieutenant in the Navy, who died eight months later of consumption. Two months after his death their child Henrietta Mary, the 'Hen' who was Borrow's life companion, was born. There is a letter among my Borrow Papers addressed to the widow by her husband's father at this time. It is dated 17th June 1818, and runs as follows:

Mary Skepper was certainly a bright, intelligent girl, as I gather from a manuscript poem before me written to a friend on the eve of leaving school. As a widow, living at first with her parents at Oulton Hall, and later with her little daughter in the neighbouring cottage, she would seem to have busied herself with all kinds of philanthropies, and she was clearly in sympathy with the religious enthusiasms of certain neighbouring families of Evangelical persuasion, particularly the Gurneys and the Cunninghams. The Rev. Francis Cunningham was Rector of Pakefield, near Lowestoft, from 1814 to 1830. He married Richenda, a sister of the distinguished Joseph John Gurney and of Elizabeth Fry, in 1816. In 1830 he became Vicar of St. Margaret's, Lowestoft. His brother, John William Cunningham, was Vicar of Harrow, and married a Verney of the famous Buckinghamshire family. This John William Cunningham was a great light of the Evangelical Churches of his time, and was for many years editor of The Christian Observer. His daughter Mary Richenda married Sir James Fitzjames Stephen,[Pg 218] the well-known judge, and the brother of Sir Leslie Stephen. But to return to Francis Cunningham, whose acquaintance with Borrow was brought about through Mrs. Clarke. Cunningham was a great supporter of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and was the founder of the Paris branch. It was speedily revealed to him that Borrow's linguistic abilities could be utilised by the Society, and he secured the co-operation of his brother-in-law, Joseph John Gurney, in an effort to find Borrow work in connection with the Society. There is a letter of Borrow's to Mrs. Clarke of this period in my Borrow Papers which my readers will already have read.[137]

We do not meet Mary Clarke again until 1834, when we find a letter from her to Borrow addressed to St. Petersburg, in which she notifies to him that he has been 'mentioned at many of the Bible Meetings this year,' adding that 'dear Mr. Cunningham' had spoken so nicely of him at an Oulton gathering. 'As I am not afraid of making you proud,' she continues, 'I will tell you one of his remarks. He mentioned you as one of the most extraordinary and interesting individuals of the present day.' Henceforth clearly Mary Clarke corresponded regularly with Borrow, and one or two extracts from her letters are given by Dr. Knapp. Joseph Jowett of the Bible Society forwarded Borrow's letters from Russia to Cunningham, who handed them to Mrs. Clarke and her parents. Borrow had proposed to continue his mission by leaving Russia for China, but this Mary Clarke opposed:

[Pg 219]

In 1835 Borrow was back in England at Norwich with his mother, and on a visit to Mary Clarke and the Skeppers at Oulton. Mrs. Skepper died just before his arrival in England—that is, in September 1835—while her husband died in February 1836. Mary Clarke's only brother died in the following year.[139]

Thus we see Mary Clarke, aged about forty, left to fight the world with her daughter, aged twenty-three, and not only to fight the world but her own family, particularly her brother's widow, owing to certain ambiguities in her father's will which are given forth in dreary detail in Dr. Knapp's Life.[140] It was these legal[Pg 220] quarrels that led Mary Clarke and her daughter to set sail for Spain, where Mary had had the indefatigable and sympathetic correspondent during the previous year of trouble. Borrow and Mary Clarke met, as we have seen, at Seville and there, at a later period, they became 'engaged.' Mrs. Clarke and her daughter Henrietta sailed for Spain in the Royal Tar, leaving London for Cadiz in June 1839. Much keen correspondence between Borrow and Mrs. Clarke had passed before the final decision to visit Spain. His mother was one of the few people who knew of Mrs. Clarke's journey to Seville, and must have understood, as mothers do, what was pending, although her son did not. When the engagement is announced to her—in November 1839—she writes to Mary Clarke a kindly, affectionate letter:

There is no reason whatever to accept Dr. Knapp's suggestion,[141] strange as coming from so pronounced a hero-worshipper, that Borrow married for money. And this because he had said in one of his letters, 'It is better to suffer the halter than the yoke,' the kind of[Pg 221] thing that a man might easily say on the eve of making a proposal which he was not sure would be accepted. Nor can Dr. Knapp's further discovery of a casual remark of Borrow's—'marriage is by far the best way of getting possession of an estate'—be counted as conclusive. That Borrow was all his life devoted to his wife I think is proved by his many letters to her that are given in this volume, letters, however, which Dr. Knapp had not seen. Borrow's further tribute to his wife and stepdaughter in Wild Wales is well known:

Borrow belonged to the type of men who would never marry did not some woman mercifully take them in hand. Mrs. Clarke, when she set out for Spain, had doubtless determined to marry Borrow. It is clear that he had no idea of marrying her. Yet he was certainly 'engaged,' as we learn from a letter to Mr. Brackenbury, to be given hereafter, when he wrote a letter from Seville to Mr. Brandram, dated March 18, in which he said: 'I wish very much to spend the remaining years of my life in the northern parts of China, as I think I have a call to those regions.... I hope yet to die in the cause of my Redeemer.' Surely never did man take so curious a view of the responsibilities of marriage.[Pg 222] He must have known that his proposal would be declined—as it was.

Very soon after the engagement Borrow experienced his third term of imprisonment in Spain, this time, however, only for thirty hours, and all because he had asked the Alcalde, or mayor of the district in which he lived, for his passport, and had quarrelled with his worship over the matter. Borrow gave up the months of this winter of 1839 rather to writing his first important book, The Gypsies of Spain, than to the concerns of the Bible Society. Finally Borrow, with Mrs. Clarke and her daughter, sailed from Cadiz on the 3rd April 1840, as we have already related. He had with him his Jewish servant, Hayim Ben Attar, and his Arabian horse, Sidi Habismilk, both of which were to astonish the natives of the Suffolk broads. The party reached London on 16th April and stayed at the Spread Eagle Inn, Gracechurch Street. The marriage took place at St. Peter's Church, Cornhill, on 23rd April 1840.

MRS. BORROW'S COPY OF HER MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE.

There are only two letters from Mrs. Borrow to her husband extant. Dr. Knapp apparently discovered none in the Borrow Papers in his possession. The two before me were written in the Hereford Square days[Pg 223] between the years 1860 and 1869—the last year of Mrs. Borrow's life. The pair had been married some twenty-five years at least, and it is made clear by these letters alone that at the end of this period they were still a most happily assorted couple. Mrs. Borrow must have gone to Brighton for her health on two separate occasions, each time accompanied by her daughter. Borrow, who had enjoyed many a pleasant ramble on his own account, as we shall see—rambles which extended as far away as Constantinople—is 'keeping house' in Hereford Square, Brompton, the while. It will be noted that Mrs. Borrow signed herself 'Carreta,' the pet name that her husband always gave her. Dr. Knapp points out that 'carreta' means a Spanish dray-cart, and that 'carita,' 'my dear,' was probably meant. But, careless as was the famous word-master over the spelling of words in the tongues that he never really mastered scientifically, he could scarcely have made so obvious a blunder as this, and there must have been some particular experience in the lives of husband and wife that led to the playful designation.[142] Here are the two letters:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Grenville Place, Brighton, Sussex.

Carreta.

Sunday morning, 10 o'clock.

To George Borrow, Esq.

33 Grenville Place, Brighton, Sussex.
Thursday morning.

Carreta.

There is one letter from Borrow to his wife, written from London in 1843, in which he says:

Assuredly no reader can peruse the following pages without recognising the true affection for his wife that is transparent in his letters to her. Arthur Dalrymple's remark that he had frequently seen Borrow and his wife travelling:

is clearly a travesty. 'Mrs. Borrow was devoted to her husband, and looked after business matters; and he always treated her with exceeding kindness,' is the verdict of Miss Elizabeth Jay, who was frequently privileged to visit the husband and wife at Oulton.

[Pg 226]

CHAPTER XXI

'THE CHILDREN OF THE OPEN AIR'

Behold George Borrow, then, in a comfortable home on the banks of Oulton Broad—a family man. His mother—sensible woman—declines her son's invitation to live with the newly-married pair. She remains in the cottage at Norwich where her husband died. The Borrows were married in April 1840, by May they had settled at Oulton. It was a pleasantly secluded estate, and Borrow's wife had £450 a year. He had, a month before his marriage, written to Mr. Brandram to say that he had a work nearly ready for publication, and 'two others in a state of forwardness.' The title of the first of these books he enclosed in his letter. It was The Zincali: Or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain. Mr. Samuel Smiles, in his history of the House of Murray—A Publisher and his Friends—thus relates the circumstances of its publication:—

It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did not really commence to sell until The Bible in Spain came a year or so later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June 1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly reviews in some half dozen journals, including The Athenæum and The Literary Gazette. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on its title-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make The Zincali a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the Edinburgh Review at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper, philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to The Bible in Spain. But The Zincali is too confused, too ill-arranged a book[Pg 228] to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are passages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. For Borrow was not a man of science—a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order.

No one, indeed, who had read only The Zincali among Borrow's works could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a veritable cult, to earn for him the title of 'the walking lord of gypsy lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books both in fact and fiction—but not one as great as his own. The city of Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other, was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton was to become. Richard Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with quite wonderful prescience:

Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in Lavengro and The Romany[Pg 229] Rye he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies, and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In The Gypsies of Spain we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies. 'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them, suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The most noteworthy figure in The Zincali is the gypsy soldier of Valdepeñas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human blood'—these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been, the gitános have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's other books The Zincali will be pronounced a readable collection of anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of vagabondage in a manner[Pg 230] that thrilled many hearts. He had some predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies without thinking of Borrow.'[147] In her biography of one of these successors in gypsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland, Mrs. Pennell discusses the probability that Borrow and Leland met in the British Museum. That is admitted in a letter from Leland to Borrow in my possession. To this letter Borrow made no reply. It was wrong of him. But he was then—in 1873—a prematurely old man, worn out and saddened by neglect and a sense of literary failure. For this and for the other vagaries of those latter years Borrow will not be judged harshly by those who read his story here. Nothing could be more courteous than Borrow's one letter to Leland, written in the failing handwriting—once so excellent—of the last sad decade of his life:

AN APPLICATION FOR A BOOK IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, WITH BORROWS SIGNATURE

22 Hereford Square, Brompton, Nov. 2, 1871.

George Borrow.[148]
[Pg 231]

The meeting did not, through Leland's absence from London, then take place. Two years later it was another story. The failing powers were more noteworthy. Borrow was by this time dead to the world, as the documents before me abundantly testify. It is not, therefore, necessary to assume, as Leland's friends have all done, that Borrow never replied because he was on the eve of publishing a book of his own about the gypsies. There seems no reason to assume, as Dr. Knapp does and as Leland does, that this was the reason for the unanswered letter:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Langham Hotel, Portland Place, March 31st, 1873.

Charles G. Leland.

Francis Hindes Groome remarked when reviewing Borrow's Word Book in 1874,[149] that when The Gypsies of Spain was published in 1841 'there were not two educated men in England who possessed the slightest knowledge of Romany.' In the intervening thirty-three years all this was changed. There was an army of gypsy scholars or scholar gypsies of whom Leland was one, Hindes Groome another, and Professor E. H. Palmer a third, to say nothing of many scholars and students of Romany in other lands. Not one of them seemed when Borrow published his Word Book of the Romany to see that he was the only man of genius among them. They only saw that he was an inferior philologist to them all. And so Borrow, who prided himself on things that he could do indifferently quite as much as[Pg 233] upon things that he could do well, suffered once again, as he was so often doomed to suffer, from the lack of appreciation which was all in all to him, and his career went out in a veritable blizzard. He published nothing after his Romano Lavo-Lil appeared in 1874.[150] He was then indeed a broken and a bitter man, with no further interest in life. Dedications of books to him interested him not at all. In any other mood, or a few years earlier, Leland's book, The English Gypsies,[151] would have gladdened his heart. In his preface Leland expresses 'the highest respect for the labours of Mr. George Borrow in this field,' he quotes Borrow continually and with sympathy, and renders him honour as a philologist, that has usually been withheld. 'To Mr. Borrow is due the discovery that the word Jockey is of gypsy origin and derived from chuckiri, which means a whip,' and he credits Borrow with the discovery of the origin of 'tanner' for sixpence; he vindicates him as against Dr. A. F. Pott,—a prince among students of gypsydom—of being the first to discover that the English gypsies call the Bible the Shaster. But there is a wealth of scientific detail in Leland's books that is not to be found in Borrow's, as also there is in Francis Hindes Groome's works. What had Borrow to do with science? He could not even give the word 'Rúmani' its accent, and called it 'Romany.' He 'quietly appropriated,' says Groome, 'Bright's Spanish gypsy words for his own work,[Pg 234] mistakes and all, without one word of recognition. I think one has the ancient impostor there.'[152] 'His knowledge of the strange history of the gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil,' says Groome elsewhere.[153] Yet Mr. Hindes Groome readily acknowledges that Borrow is above all writers on the gypsies. 'He communicates a subtle insight into gypsydom'—that is the very essence of the matter.[154] Controversy will continue in the future as in the present as to whether the gypsies are all that Borrow thought them. Perhaps 'corruption has crept in among them' as it did with the prize-fighters. They have intermarried with the gorgios, thrown over their ancient customs, lost all their picturesque qualities, it may be. But Borrow has preserved in literature for all time, as not one of the philologists and folk-lore students has done, a remarkable type of people. But this is not to be found in his first original work, The Zincali, nor in his last, The Romano Lavo-Lil. This glamour is to be found in Lavengro and The Romany Rye, to which books we shall come in due course. Here we need only refer to the fact that Borrow had loved the gypsies all his life—from his boyish meeting with Petulengro until in advancing years the prototype of that wonderful creation of his imagination—for[Pg 235] this the Petulengro of Lavengro undoubtedly was—came to visit him at Oulton. Well might Leland call him 'the Nestor of Gypsydom.'

We find the following letter to Dr. Bowring accompanying a copy of The Zincali:

To Dr. John Bowring.

58 Jermyn Street, St. James, April 14, 1841.

George Borrow.

Two years later we find Borrow writing to an unknown correspondent upon a phase of folk-lore:

Oulton, Lowestoft, Suffolk, August 11, 1843.

George Borrow.

[Pg 237]

CHAPTER XXII

THE BIBLE IN SPAIN

In an admirable appreciation of our author, the one in which he gives the oft-quoted eulogy concerning him as 'the delightful, the bewitching, the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised George Borrow,' Mr. Birrell records the solace that may be found by small boys in the ambiguities of a title-page, or at least might have been found in it in his youth and in mine. In those days in certain Puritan circles a very strong line was drawn between what was known as Sunday reading, and reading that might be permitted on week-days. The Sunday book must have a religious flavour. There were magazines with that particular flavour, every story in them having a pious moral withal. Very closely watched and scrutinised was the reading of young people in those days and in those circles. Mr. Birrell, doubtless, speaks from autobiographical memories when he tells us of a small boy with whose friends The Bible in Spain passed muster on the strength of its title-page. For Mr. Birrell is the son of a venerated Nonconformist minister; and perhaps he, or at least those who were of his household, had this religious idiosyncrasy. It may be that the distinction which pervaded the evangelical circles of Mr. Birrell's youth as to what were Sunday books, as[Pg 238] distinct from books to be read on week-days, has disappeared. In any case think of the advantage of the boy of that generation who was able to handle a book with so unexceptionable a title as The Bible in Spain. His elders would succumb at once, particularly if the boy had the good sense to call their attention to the sub-title—'The Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonments of an Englishman in an Attempt to Circulate the Scriptures in the Peninsula.' Nothing could be said by the most devout of seniors against so prepossessing a title-page.[155] But what of the boy who had thus passed the censorship? What a revelation of adventure was open to him! Perhaps he would skip the 'preachy' parts in which Borrow was doubtless sincere, although the sincerity has so uncertain a ring to-day. Here are five passages, for example, which do not seem to belong to the book:

All this does not ring quite true, and in any case it is too much on the lines of 'Sunday reading' to please the small boy, who must, however, have found a thousand things in that volume that were to his taste—some of the wildest adventures, hairbreadth escapes, extraordinary meetings again and again with unique people—with Benedict Mol, for example, who was always seeking for treasure. Gypsies, bull-fighters, quaint and queer characters of every kind, come before us in rapid succession. Rarely, surely, have so many adventures been crowded into the same number of pages. Only when Borrow remembers, as he has to do occasionally, that he is an agent of the Bible Society does the book lose its vigour and its charm. We have already pointed out that the foundations of the volume were contained in certain letters written by Borrow during[Pg 240] his five years in Spain to the secretaries of the Bible Society in London. The recent publication of these letters has revealed to us Borrow's methods. When he had settled down at Oulton he took down his notebooks, one of which is before me, but finding this was not sufficient, he asked the Bible Society for the loan of his letters to them.[156] Other letters that he hoped to use were not forthcoming, as the following note from Miss Gurney to Mrs. Borrow indicates:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Earlham, 12th June 1840.

C. Gurney.[157]

The Bible Society applied to in the same manner lent Borrow all his letters to that organisation and its secretaries. Not all were returned. Many came to Dr. Knapp when he purchased the half of the Borrow papers that were sold after Borrow's death; the remainder are in my possession. It is a nice point, seventy years after they were written, as to whom they belong. In any case the Bible Society must have kept copies of everything, for when, in 1911, they came to publish the Letters[158] the collection was sufficiently complete. That publication revealed some interesting sidelights. It proved on the one hand that Borrow had drawn more upon his diaries than upon his letters, although he frequently reproduced fragments of his diaries in his letters. It revealed further the extraordinary frankness with which Borrow wrote to his employers. But the main point is in the discovery revealed to us that Borrow was not an artist in his letters. Borrow was never a good letter writer, although I think that many of the letters that appear[Pg 242] for the first time in these pages will prove that his letters are very interesting as contributions to biography. If some of the letters that helped to make up The Bible in Spain are interesting, it is because in them Borrow incorporated considerable fragments of anecdote and adventure from his notebooks. It is quite a mistake to assume, as does Dr. Knapp, that the 'Rev. and Dear Sir' at the head of a letter was the only variation. You will look in vain in the Bible Society correspondence for many a pearl that is contained in The Bible in Spain, and you will look in vain in The Bible in Spain for many a sentence which concludes some of the original letters. In one case, indeed, a letter concludes with Heber's hymn—

with which Borrow's correspondent must already have been sufficiently familiar. But Borrow could not be other than Borrow, and the secretaries of the Bible Society had plentiful matter with which to astonish them. The finished production, however, is a fascinating book. You read it again and it becomes still more entertaining. No wonder that it took the world by storm and made its author the lion of a season. 'A queer book will be this same Bible in Spain,' wrote Borrow to John Murray in August 1841, 'containing all my queer adventures in that queer country ... it will make two nice foolscap octavo volumes.'[159] It actually made three volumes, and Borrow was as irritated at Mr. Murray's delay in publishing as that publisher afterwards became at Borrow's own delay over Lavengro. The whole book was laboriously copied out by Mrs. Borrow. When this copy was sent to Mr. Murray, it[Pg 243] was submitted to his 'reader,' who reported 'numerous faults in spelling and some in grammar,' to which criticism Borrow retorted that the copy was the work of 'a country amanuensis.' The book was published in December 1842, but has the date 1843 on its title-page.[160] In its three-volumed form 4750 copies of the book were issued by July 1843, after which countless copies were sold in cheaper one-volumed form. Success had at last come to Borrow. He was one of the most talked-of writers of the day. His elation may be demonstrated by his discussion with Dawson Turner as to whether he should leave the manuscript of The Bible in Spain to the Dean and Chapter's Library at Norwich or to the British Museum, by his gratification at the fact that Sir Robert Peel referred to his book in the House of Commons, and by his pleasure in the many appreciative reviews which, indeed, were for the most part all that an ambitious author could desire. 'Never,' said The Examiner, 'was book more legibly impressed with the unmistakable mark of genius.' 'There is no taking leave of a book like this,' said the Athenæum. 'Better Christmas fare we have never had it in our power to offer our readers.'

[Pg 244]

A SHEKEL

given to Borrow by Hasfeld, his Danish friend, as a talisman when they parted at St. Petersburg. In The Bible in Spain Borrow relates that he showed this shekel at Gibraltar to a Jew, who exclaimed, 'Brothers, witness, these are the letters of Solomon. This silver is blessed. We must kiss this money.'

The publication of The Bible in Spain made Borrow famous for a time. Hitherto he had been known only to a small religious community, the coterie that ran the Bible Society. Even the large mass of people who subscribed to that Society knew its agent in Spain only by meagre allusions in the Annual Reports. Now the world was to talk about him, and he enjoyed being talked about. Borrow declared—in 1842—that the five years he passed in Spain were the most happy years of his existence. But then he had not had a happy life during the previous years, as we have seen, and in Russia he had a toilsome task with an added element of uncertainty as to the permanence of his position. The five years in Spain had plentiful adventure, and they closed in a pleasant manner. Yet the year that followed, even though it found him almost a country squire, was not a happy one. Once again the world did not want him and his books—not the Gypsies of Spain for example. Seven weeks after publication it had sold only to the extent of some three hundred copies.[161] But the happiest year of Borrow's life was undoubtedly the one that followed the publication of The Bible in Spain. Up to that time he had been a mere adventurer; now he was that most joyous of beings—a successful author; and here, from among his Papers, is a carefully preserved relic of his social triumph:[Pg 245]

To George Borrow, Esq., at Mr. Murray's, Bookseller, Albemarle Street.

4 Carlton Terrace, Tuesday, 30th May.

In a letter to his wife, of which a few lines are printed in Dr. Knapp's book, he also writes of this visit to the Prussian Minister, where he had for company 'Princes and Members of Parliament.' 'I was the star of the evening,' he says; 'I thought to myself, "what a difference!"'[162] The following letter is in a more sober key:

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Suffolk.

Wednesday, 58 Jermyn Street.

George Borrow.

The earliest literary efforts of Borrow in Spain were his two translations of St. Luke's Gospel—the one into Romany, the other into Basque. This last book he did not actually translate himself, but procured 'from a Basque physician of the name of Oteiza.'[Pg 247]

TITLE-PAGE OF BASQUE TRANSLATION BY OTEIZA OF THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE

TITLE-PAGE OF FIRST EDITION OF ROMANY TRANSLATION OF THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE

TWO PAGES FROM BORROW'S CORRECTED PROOF SHEETS OF ROMANY TRANSLATION OF THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE

[Pg 248]

CHAPTER XXIII

RICHARD FORD

The most distinguished of Borrow's friends in the years that succeeded his return from Spain was Richard Ford, whose interests were so largely wrapped-up in the story of that country. Ford was possessed of a very interesting personality, which was not revealed to the public until Mr. Rowland E. Prothero issued his excellent biography[164] in 1905, although Ford died in 1858. This delay is the more astonishing as Ford's Handbook for Travellers in Spain was one of the most famous books of its day. Ford's father, Sir Richard Ford, was a friend of William Pitt, and twice sat in Parliament, being at one time Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. He ended his official career as a police magistrate at Bow Street, but deserves to be better known to fame as the creator of the mounted police force of London. Ford was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, inheriting a fortune from his father, and from his mother an extraordinary taste for art. Although called to the bar he never practised, but spent his time in travelling on the Continent, building up a valuable collection of books and paintings. He was three times married, and all these unions seem to[Pg 249] have been happy, in spite of an almost unpleasant celerity in the second alliance, which took place nine months after the death of his first wife. A very large portion of his life he devoted to Spain, which he knew so intimately that in 1845 he produced that remarkable Handbook in two closely printed volumes, a most repellent-looking book in appearance to those who are used to contemporary typography, usually so attractive. Ford, in fact, was so full of his subject that instead of a handbook he wrote a work which ought to have appeared in half a dozen volumes. In later editions the book was condensed into one of Mr. Murray's usual guide-books, but the curious may still enjoy the work in its earliest form, so rich in discussions of the Spanish people, their art and architecture, their history and their habits. The greater part of the letters in Mr. Prothero's collection are addressed to Addington, who was our ambassador to Madrid for some years, until he was superseded by George Villiers, Lord Clarendon, with whom Borrow came so much in contact. Those letters reveal a remarkably cultivated mind and an interesting outlook on life, an outlook that was always intensely anti-democratic. It is impossible to sympathise with him in his brutal reference to the execution by the Spaniards of Robert Boyd, a young Irishman who was captured with Torrijos by the Spanish Government in 1831. Richard Ford apparently left Spain very shortly before George Borrow entered that country. Ford passed through Madrid on his way to England in September 1833. He then settled near Exeter, purchasing an Elizabethan cottage called Heavitree House, with twelve acres of land, and devoted himself to turning it into a beautiful mansion. Presumably he first met Borrow in Mr. John[Pg 250] Murray's famous drawing-room soon after the publication of The Gypsies of Spain. He tells Addington, indeed, in a letter of 14th January 1841:

Ford's article upon Borrow's book appeared in The British and Foreign Review, and Ford was delighted that the book had created a sensation, and that he had given sound advice as to publishing the manuscript. When The Bible in Spain was ready, Ford was one of the first to read it. Then he wrote to John Murray:

And in that letter Ford describes the book as putting him in mind of Gil Blas with 'a touch of Bunyan.' Lockhart himself reviewed the book in The Quarterly, so Ford had to go to the rival organ—The Edinburgh Review—receiving £44 for the article, which sum, he tells us, he invested in Château Margaux.

Ford's first letter to Borrow in my collection is written in Spanish:

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall, Lowestoft.

Heavitree House, Exeter, Jan. 19, 1842.

Richard Ford.[165]
[Pg 252]

Here is a second letter of the following month:

February 26th, Heavitree House, Exeter.

R. F.

During these years—1843 and onwards—Borrow was regularly corresponding with Ford. I quote a sentence from one of these letters:

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall, Lowestoft.

123 Park Mansions, Thursday, April 13, 1843.

R. F.

This speech of Peel's in the House of Commons, in which in reply to a very trivial question by Dr. Bowring, then M.P. for Bolton, upon the subject of the correspondence of the British Government with Turkey, the great statesman urged:

Borrow was elated with the compliment, and asked Mr. Murray two months later if he could not advertise the eulogium with one of his books.[Pg 255]

In June 1844, while the Handbook for Travellers in Spain was going to press, Ford went on a visit to Borrow at Oulton, and describes the pair as 'two rum coves in a queer country'; and further gives one of the best descriptions of the place:

When the Handbook for Travellers in Spain was published in 1845 it was agreed that Borrow should write the review for The Quarterly. Instead of writing a review Borrow, possessed by that tactlessness which so frequently overcame him, wrote an article on 'Spain and the Spaniards,' very largely of abuse, an absolutely useless production from the point of view of Ford the author, and of Lockhart, his editor friend. Borrow never forgave Lockhart for returning this manuscript, but that it had no effect on Ford's friendship is shown by the following letter, dated 1846 (p. 258), written long after the unfortunate episode, and another in Dr. Knapp's Life, dated 1851:

To Mrs. Borrow, Oulton Hall, Lowestoft.

Oct. 6, 1844, Cheltenham.

Rch. Ford.

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall, Lowestoft.

123 Parliament Street,
Grosvenor Square, Feb. 17, 1845.

Richard Ford.

A proof in slip form of the rejected review, with Borrow's corrections written upon it, is in my possession. Our author pictures Gibraltar as a human entity thus addressing Spain:

And so on through many sentences of excited rhetoric. Borrow forgot while he wrote that he had a book to review—a book, moreover, issued by the publishing house which issued the periodical in which his review was to appear. And this book was a book in ten thousand—a veritable mine of information and out of the way learning. Surely this slight reference amid many dissertations of his own upon Spain was to damn his friend's book with faint praise:

Yet successful as was Ford's Handbook, it is doubtful but that Borrow was right in saying that it had better have been called Wanderings in Spain or Wonders[Pg 258] of the Peninsula. How much more gracious was the statement of another great authority on Spain—Sir William Stirling-Maxwell—who said that 'so great a literary achievement had never before been performed under so humble a title.' The article, however, furnishes a trace of autobiography in the statement by Borrow that he had long been in the habit of reading Don Quixote once every nine years. Yet he tells us that he prefers Le Sage's Gil Blas to Don Quixote, 'the characters introduced being certainly more true to nature.' But altogether we do not wonder that Lockhart declined to publish the article. Here is the last letter in my possession; after this there is one in the Knapp collection dated 1851, acknowledging a copy of Lavengro, in which Ford adds: 'Mind when you come to see the Exhibition you look in here, for I long to have a chat,' and so the friendship appears to have collapsed as so many friendships do. Ford died at Heavitree in 1858:

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall, Lowestoft

Heavitree, Jany. 28, 1846.

Richard Ford.

[Pg 260]

CHAPTER XXIV

IN EASTERN EUROPE

In 1844 Borrow set out for the most distant holiday that he was ever to undertake. Passing through London in March 1844, he came under the critical eye of Elizabeth Rigby, afterwards Lady Eastlake, that formidable critic who four years later—in 1848—wrote the cruel review of Jane Eyre in The Quarterly that gave so much pain to Charlotte Brontë. She was not a nice woman. These sharp, 'clever' women-critics rarely are; and Borrow never made a pleasant impression when such women came across his path—instance Harriet Martineau, Frances Cobbe, and Agnes Strickland. We should sympathise with him, and not count it for a limitation, as some of his biographers have done. The future Lady Eastlake thus disposes of Borrow in her one reference to him:

Quoting this description of Borrow, Dr. Knapp describes it as 'shallow'—for 'he was one of the[Pg 261] kindest of men, as my documents show.' The description is shallow enough, because the writer had no kind of comprehension of Borrow, but then, perhaps, his champion had not. Borrow was neither one of the 'kindest of men' nor the reverse. He was a good hater and a whole-hearted lover, and to be thus is to fill a certain uncomfortable but not discreditable place in the scheme of things. About a month later Borrow was on the way to the East, travelling by Paris and Vienna. From Paris he wrote to Mr. John Murray that Vidocq 'wished much to have a copy of my Gypsies in Spain,' but suspects the Frenchman of desiring to produce a compressed translation. Will Mr. Murray have the book translated into French? he asks, and so circumvent his wily friend.[168] In June he is in Buda Pesth, whence he wrote to his wife:

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Pesth, Hungary, 14th June 1844.

In the intervening journey between Pesth and Constantinople he must have talked long and wandered far and wide among the gypsies, for Charles L. Brace in his Hungary in 1851 gives us a glimpse of him at Grosswardein holding conversation with the gypsies:

The four following letters require no comment:

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Debreczen, Hungary, 8th July 1844.

G. B.

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Hermanstadt, July 30, 1844.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Bucharest, August 5, 1844.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Bucharest, August 14, 1844.

G. Borrow.

The best letter that I have of this journey, and indeed[Pg 270] the best letter of Borrow's that I have read, is one from Constantinople to his wife—the only letter by him from that city:

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Constantinople, 16th September 1844.

G. B.

He returned home by way of Venice and Rome as the following two letters indicate:

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Venice, 22nd Octr. 1844.

[Pg 272]

G. B.

To Mrs. George Borrow, Oulton, Lowestoft

Rome, 1 Nov. 1844.

G. Borrow.

[Pg 275]

CHAPTER XXV

LAVENGRO

The Bible in Spain bears on its title-page the date 1843, although my copy makes it clear in Borrow's handwriting that it was really ready for publication in the previous year.

Borrow's handwriting had changed its character somewhat when he inscribed to his wife a copy of his next book Lavengro in 1851.

In the intervening eight or nine years he had travelled[Pg 276] much—suffered much. During all these years he had been thinking about, talking about, his next book, making no secret of the fact that it was to be an Autobiography. Even before The Bible in Spain was issued he had written to Mr. John Murray foreshadowing a book in which his father, William Taylor, and others were to put in an appearance. In the 'Advertisement' to The Romany Rye he tells us that 'the principal part of Lavengro was written in the year '43, that the whole of it was completed before the termination of the year '46, and that it was in the hands of the publisher in the year '48.' As the idea grew in his mind, his friend, Richard Ford, gave him much sound advice:

And so in the following years, now to Ford, now to Murray, he traces his progress, while in 1844 he tells Dawson Turner that he is 'at present engaged in a kind of Biography in the Robinson Crusoe style.'[170] But in the same year he went to Buda-Pesth, Venice, and Constantinople. The first advertisement of the book appeared in The Quarterly Review in July 1848, when Lavengro, An Autobiography, was announced. Later in the same year Mr. Murray advertised the book as Life, A Drama; and Dr. Knapp, who had in his collection the original proof-sheets of Lavengro, reproduces the title-page of the book which then stood as Life, A Drama, and bore the date 1849. Borrow's procrastination in delivering the complete book worried John Murray exceedingly. Not unnaturally, for in[Pg 277] 1848 he had offered the book at his annual sale dinner to the booksellers who had subscribed to it liberally. Eighteen months later Murray was still worrying Borrow for the return of the proof-sheets of the third and last volume. Not until January 1850 do we hear of it as Lavengro, An Autobiography, and under this title it was advertised in The Quarterly Review for that month as 'nearly ready for publication.' In April 1850 we find Woodfall, John Murray's printer, writing letter after letter urging celerity, to which Mrs. Borrow replies, excusing the delay on account of her husband's indifferent health. They have been together in lodgings at Yarmouth. 'He had many plunges into the briny Ocean, which seemed to do him good.'[171] Murray continued to exhort, but the final chapter did not reach him. 'My sale is fixed for December 12th,' he writes in November, 'and if I cannot show the book then I must throw it up.' This threat had little effect, for on 13th December we find Murray still coaxing his dilatory author, telling him with justice that there were passages in his book 'equal to Defoe.' The very printer, Mr. Woodfall, joined in the chase. 'The public is quite prepared to devour your book,' he wrote, which was unhappily not the case. Nor was Ford a happier prophet, although a true friend when he wrote—'I am sure it will be the book of the year when it is brought forth.'[172] The activity of Mrs. Borrow in this matter of the publication of Lavengro is interesting. 'My husband ... is, I assure you, doing all he can as regards the completion of the book,' she writes[Pg 278] to Mr. Murray in December 1849, and in November of the following year Murray writes to her to say that he is engraving Phillips's portrait of Borrow for the book. 'I think a cheering letter from you will do Mr. Borrow good,' she writes later. Throughout the whole correspondence between publisher and printer we are impressed by Mrs. Borrow's keen interest in her husband's book, her anxiety that he should be humoured. Sadly did Borrow need to be humoured, for if he had cherished the illusion that his book would really be the 'Book of the Year' he was to suffer a cruel disillusion. Scarcely any one wanted it. All the critics abused it. In The Athenæum it was bluntly pronounced a failure. 'The story of Lavengro will content no one,' said Sir William Stirling-Maxwell in Fraser's Magazine. The book 'will add but little to Mr. Borrow's reputation,' said Blackwood. The only real insight into the book's significance was provided by Thomas Gordon Hake in a letter to The New Monthly Review, in which journal the editor, Harrison Ainsworth, had already pronounced a not very favourable opinion. 'Lavengro's roots will strike deep into the soil of English letters,' wrote Dr. Hake, and he then pronounced a verdict now universally accepted. George Henry Lewes once happily remarked that he would make an appreciation of Boswell's Life of Johnson a test of friendship. Many of us would be almost equally inclined to make such a test of Borrow's Lavengro. Tennyson declared that an enthusiasm for Milton's Lycidas was a touchstone of taste in poetry. May we not say that an enthusiasm for Borrow's Lavengro is now a touchstone of taste in English prose literature?

But the reception of Lavengro by the critics, and[Pg 279] also by the public,[173] may be said to have destroyed Borrow's moral fibre. Henceforth, it was a soured and disappointed man who went forth to meet the world. We hear much in the gossip of contemporaries of Borrow's eccentricities, it may be of his rudeness and gruffness, in the last years of his life. Only those who can realise the personality of a self-contained man, conscious, as all genius has ever been, of its achievement, and conscious also of the failure of the world to recognise, will understand—and will sympathise.

Borrow, as we have seen, took many years to write Lavengro. 'I am writing the work,' he told Dawson Turner, 'in precisely the same manner as The Bible in Spain, viz., on blank sheets of old account-books, backs of letters,' etc., and he recalls Mahomet writing the Koran on mutton bones as an analogy to his own 'slovenliness of manuscript.'[174] I have had plenty of opportunity of testing this slovenliness in the collection of manuscripts of portions of Lavengro that have come into my possession. These are written upon pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, although at least a third of the book in Borrow's very neat handwriting is contained in a leather notebook, of which I give examples of the title-page and opening leaf in facsimile. The title-page demonstrates the earliest form of Borrow's conception. Not only did he then contemplate an undisguised autobiography, but even described himself, as he frequently did in his conversation, as 'a Norfolk man.' Before the book was finished, however, he repudiated the autobiographical note, and by the time he sat down to write The Romany Rye we find him fiercely denouncing his critics for coming to such a conclusion. 'The writer,' he declares, 'never said it was an autobiography; never authorised any person to say it was one.' Which was doubtless true, in a measure. Yet I find among my Borrow Papers the following letter from Whitwell Elwin, who, writing from Booton Rectory on 21st October 1852, and addressing him as 'My dear Mr. Borrow,' said:

[Pg 280]

THE ORIGINAL TITLE-PAGE OF LAVENGRO.

From the Manuscript in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle.'

[Pg 281]

[Pg 282]

FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF LAVENGRO.

From the Manuscript in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle.'

[Pg 283]

To this letter, as we learn from Elwin's Life, 'instead of roaring like a lion,' as Elwin had expected, he returned quite a 'lamb-like note.'

Read by the light in which we all judge the book to-day, this estimate by Elwin was about as fatuous as most contemporary criticisms of a masterpiece. Which is only to say that it is rarely given to contemporary critics to judge accurately of the great work that comes to them amid a mass that is not great. That Elwin, although not a good editor of Pope, was a sound critic of the literature of a period anterior to his own is demonstrated by the admirable essays from his pen that have been reprinted with an excellent memoir of him by his son.[175] In this memoir we have a capital glimpse of our hero:

While writing of Whitwell Elwin and his association with Borrow, which was sometimes rather strained as we shall see when The Romany Rye comes to be published, it is interesting to turn to Elwin's final impression of Borrow, as conveyed in a letter which the recipient[177] has kindly placed at my disposal. It was written from Booton Rectory, and is dated 27th October 1893:

[Pg 285]

Two letters by Mr. Elwin to Borrow, from my Borrow Papers, both dated 1853—two years after Lavengro was written,—may well have place here:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Booton, Norwich, Oct. 26, 1853.

W. Elwin.

To George Borrow, Esq.

Booton Rectory, Norwich, Nov. 5, 1853.

[Pg 287]

W. Elwin.

I have said that I possess large portions of Lavengro in manuscript. Borrow's always helpful wife, however, copied out the whole manuscript for the publishers, and this 'clean copy' came to Dr. Knapp, who found even here a few pages of very valuable writing deleted, and these he has very rightly restored in Mr. Murray's edition of Lavengro. Why Borrow took so much pains to explain that his wife had copied Lavengro, as the following document implies, I cannot think. I find in his handwriting this scrap of paper signed by Mary Borrow, and witnessed by her daughter:

Janry. 30, 1869.

Mary Borrow.

Witness: Henrietta M., daughter of Mary Borrow.

It only remains here to state the melancholy fact once again that Lavengro, great work of literature as it is now universally acknowledged to be, was not 'the book of the year.' The three thousand copies of[Pg 288] the first issue took more than twenty years to sell, and it was not until 1872 that Mr. Murray resolved to issue a cheaper edition. The time was not ripe for the cult of the open road; the zest for 'the wind on the heath' that our age shares so keenly.

[Pg 289]

CHAPTER XXVI

A VISIT TO CORNISH KINSMEN

If Borrow had been a normal man of letters he would have been quite satisfied to settle down at Oulton, in a comfortable home, with a devoted wife. The question of money was no longer to worry him. He had moreover a money-making gift, which made him independent in a measure of his wife's fortune. From The Bible in Spain he must have drawn a very considerable amount, considerable, that is, for a man whose habits were always somewhat penurious. The Bible in Spain would have been followed up, were Borrow a quite other kind of man, by a succession of books almost equally remunerative. Even for one so prone to hate both books and bookmen there was always the wind on the heath, the gypsy encampment, the now famous 'broad,' not then the haunt of innumerable trippers. But Borrow ever loved wandering more than writing. Almost immediately after his marriage—in 1840—he hinted to the Bible Society of a journey to China; a year later, in June 1841, he suggested to Lord Clarendon that Lord Palmerston might give him a consulship: he consulted Hasfeld as to a possible livelihood in Berlin, and Ford as to travel in Africa. He seems to have endured residence at Oulton with difficulty during the succeeding three years, and in 1844 we find[Pg 290] him engaged upon the continental travel that we have already recorded. In 1847 he had hopes of the consulship at Canton, but Bowring wanted it for himself, and a misunderstanding over this led to an inevitable break of old friendship. Borrow's passionate love of travel was never more to be gratified at the expense of others. He tried hard, indeed, to secure a journey to the East from the British Museum Trustees, and then gave up the struggle. Further wanderings, which were many, were to be confined to Europe and indeed to England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man. His first journey, however, was not at his own initiative. Mrs. Borrow's health was unequal to the severe winters at Oulton, and so the Borrows made their home at Yarmouth from 1853 to 1860. During these years he gave his vagabond propensities full play. No year passed without its record of wandering. His first expedition was the outcome of a burst of notoriety that seems to have done for Borrow what the success of his Bible in Spain could not do—revealed his identity to his Cornish relations. The Bury Post of 17th September 1853 recorded that Borrow had at the risk of his life saved at least one member of a boat's crew wrecked on the coast at Yarmouth:

I was quite sorry to find this extract from the Bury Post among my Borrow Papers in Mrs. Borrow's[Pg 291] handwriting. It a little suggests that she sent the copy to the journal in question, or at least inspired the paragraph, perhaps in a letter to her friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, who with his family then resided at Bury St. Edmunds. Borrow was a perfect swimmer, and there is no reason to suppose but that he did act heroically.[178] In my Borrow Papers I find in his handwriting his own account of the adventure:

In any case this adventure had exceptional publicity. For example Mr. Robert Cooke of John Murray's firm wrote to Mrs. Borrow on 13th October 1853 to say that while travelling abroad he had read in Galignani's Messenger an account of his friend Lavengro's 'daring and heroic act in rescuing so many from a watery grave.' 'I wish they had all been critics,' he adds; 'he would have done just the same, and they might perhaps have shown their gratitude when they got among his inky waves of literature.'

More than this, the paragraph in the Bury St. Edmunds newspaper was copied into the Plymouth[Pg 293] Mail, and was there read by the Borrows of Cornwall, who had heard nothing of their relative, Thomas Borrow, the army captain and his family, for fifty years or more. One of Borrow's cousins by marriage, Robert Taylor of Penquite, invited him to his father's homeland, and Borrow accepted, glad, we may be sure, of any excuse for a renewal of his wanderings. And so on the 23rd of December 1853 Borrow made his way from Yarmouth to Plymouth by rail, and thence walked twenty miles to Liskeard, where quite a little party of Borrow's cousins were present to greet him. The Borrow family consisted of Henry Borrow of Looe Doun, the father of Mrs. Taylor, William Borrow of Trethinnick, Thomas Nicholas and Elizabeth Borrow, all first cousins, except Anne Taylor. Anne, talking to a friend, describes Borrow on this visit better than any one else has done:

Dr. Knapp possessed two 'notebooks' of this Cornish tour. Borrow stayed at Penquite with his cousins from 24th December to 9th January, then he went on a walking tour to Land's End, through Truro and Penzance; he was back at Penquite from 26th January to 1st February, and then took a week's tramp to Tintagel, King Arthur's Castle, and Pentire. Naturally he made inquiries into the language, already extinct, but spoken within the memory of the older inhabitants.[Pg 294] 'My relations are most excellent people,' he wrote to his wife from London on his way back, 'but I could not understand more than half of what they said.'

I have only one letter to Mrs. Borrow written during this tour:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Penquite, 27th Janry. 1854.

G. Borrow.

One of Borrow's biographers, Mr. Walling, has given us the best account of that journey through Cornwall,[180] and his explanation of why Borrow did not write the Cornish book that he caused to be advertised in a fly-leaf of The Romany Rye, by the discouragement arising out of the dire failure of that book, may be accepted.[181] Borrow would have made a beautiful book[Pg 295] upon Cornwall. Even the title, Penquite and Pentyre; or, The Head of the Forest and the Headland, has music in it. And he had in these twenty weeks made himself wonderfully well acquainted not only with the topography of the principality, but with its folklore and legend. The gulf that ever separated the Borrow of the notebook and of the unprepared letter from the Borrow of the finished manuscript was extraordinary, and we may deplore with Mr. Walling the absence of this among Borrow's many unwritten books.

Borrow was back in Yarmouth at the end of February 1854—he had not fled the country as Dalrymple had suggested—but in July he was off again for his great tour in Wales, in which he was accompanied by his wife and daughter. Of that tour we must treat in another and later chapter, for Wild Wales was not published until 1862. The year following his great tour in Wales he went on a trip to the Isle of Man.

[Pg 296]

CHAPTER XXVII

IN THE ISLE OF MAN

The holiday which Borrow gave himself the year following his visit to Wales, that is to say, in September 1855, is recorded in his unpublished diaries. He never wrote a book as the outcome of that journey, although he caused one to be advertised under the title of Bayr Jairgey and Glion Doo: Wanderings in Search of Manx Literature.[182] Dr. Knapp possessed two volumes of these notebooks closely written in pencil. These he reproduced conscientiously in his Life, and indeed here we have the most satisfactory portion of his book, for the journal is transcribed with but little modification, and so we have some thirty pages of genuine 'Borrow' that are really very attractive reading. Borrow, it will be remembered, learnt the Irish language as a mere child, much to his father's disgust. Although he never loved the Irish people, the Celtic Irish, that is to say, whose genial temperament was so opposed to his own, he did love the Irish language, which he more than once declared had incited him to become a student of many tongues. He never made the mistake into which two of his biographers have fallen of calling it 'Erse.' He was never an accurate student of the Irish language, but among Englishmen he[Pg 297] led the way in the present-day interest in that tongue—an interest which is now so pronounced among scholars of many nationalities, and has made in Ireland so definite a revival of a language that for a time seemed to be on the way to extinction. Two translations from the Irish are to be found in his Targum published so far back as 1835, and many other translations from the Irish poets were among the unpublished manuscripts that he left behind him. It would therefore be with peculiar interest that he would visit the Isle of Man which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was an Irish-speaking land, but in 1855 was at a stage when the language was falling fast into decay. What survived of it was still Irish with trifling variations in the spelling of words. 'Cranu,' a tree, for example, had become 'Cwan,' and so on—although the pronunciation was apparently much the same. When the tall, white-haired Englishman talked to the older inhabitants who knew something of the language they were delighted. 'Mercy upon us,' said one old woman, 'I believe, sir, you are of the old Manx!' Borrow was actually wandering in search of Manx literature, as the title of the book that he announced implied. He inquired about the old songs of the island, and of everything that survived of its earlier language. Altogether Borrow must have had a good time in thus following his favourite pursuit.

But Dr. Knapp's two notebooks, which are so largely taken up with these philological matters, are less human than a similar notebook that has fallen into my hands. This is a long leather pocket-book, in which, under the title of 'Expedition to the Isle of Man,' we have, written in pencil, a quite vivacious account of his adventures. It records that Borrow and his wife and daughter set out through Bury to Peterborough, Rugby, and[Pg 298] Liverpool. It tells of the admiration with which Peterborough's 'noble cathedral' inspired him. Liverpool he calls a 'London in miniature':

The party left Liverpool on 20th August, and Borrow, when in sight of the Isle of Man, noticed a lofty ridge of mountains rising to the clouds:

When he had landed he continued his investigations, asking every peasant he met the Manx for this or that English word:

One man whom Borrow asked if there were any poets in Man replied that he did not believe there were, that the last Manx poet had died some time ago at Kirk Conoshine, and this man had translated Parnell's Hermit beautifully, and the translation had been printed. He inquired about the Runic Stones, which he continually transcribed. Under date Thursday, 30th August, we find the following:

Very gladly would I follow Borrow more in detail through this interesting holiday by means of his diary,[183] but it would make my book too long. As he had his wife and daughter with him there are no letters by him from the island. But wherever Borrow went he met people who were interested in him, and so I find the following letter among his Papers, which he received a year after his return:

To George Borrow, Esq.

3 Albert Terrace, Douglas, 11 February 1856.

S. W. Wanton.

And even three years later we find that Borrow has not forgotten the friends of that Manx holiday. This letter is from the Vicar of Malew in acknowledgment of a copy of The Romany Rye published in the interval:[Pg 301]

To George Borrow, Esq.

Malew Vicarage, Ballasalla, Isle of Man, 27 Jany. 1859.

William Gill.

The letter from Mr. Wanton directs us to the issue of The Illustrated London News for 8th December 1855, where we find the following note on the Isle of Man, obviously contributed to that journal by Borrow, together with an illustration of the Runic Stone, which is also reproduced here:

RUNIC STONE FROM THE ISLE OF MAN

[Pg 304]

CHAPTER XXVIII

OULTON BROAD AND YARMOUTH

George Borrow wandered far and wide, but he always retraced his footsteps to East Anglia, of which he was so justly proud. From his marriage in 1840 until his death in 1881 he lived twenty-seven years at Oulton or at Yarmouth. 'It is on sand alone that the sea strikes its true music,' Borrow once remarked, 'Norfolk sand'—and it was in the waves and on the sands of the Norfolk coast that Borrow spent the happiest hours of his restless life. Oulton Cottage is only about two miles from Lowestoft, and so, walking or driving, these places were quite near one another. But both are in Suffolk. Was it because Yarmouth—ten miles distant—is in Norfolk that it was always selected for seaside residence? I suspect that the careful Mrs. Borrow found a wider selection of 'apartments' at a moderate price. In any case the sea air of Yarmouth was good for his wife, and the sea bathing was good for him, and so we find that husband and wife had seven separate residences at Yarmouth during the years of Oulton life.[185] But Oulton was ever to be Borrow's headquarters, even though between 1860 and 1874 he had a house in London. Borrow was thirty-seven years of age when he settled down at Oulton.

[Pg 304]

Copyright of Mrs. Simms Reeve

A HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PORTRAIT OF GEORGE BORROW

Taken in the garden of Mrs. Simms Reeve of Norwich in 1848. This is the only photograph of George Borrow extant, although two paintings of him exist, one by Henry Wyndham Phillips, which forms the frontispiece of this volume, taken in 1843, and an earlier portrait by his brother John, which will be found facing page 32

[Pg 305]

He was, he tells us in The Romany Rye, 'in tolerably easy circumstances and willing to take some rest after a life of labour.' Their home was a cottage on the Broad, for the Hall, which was also Mrs. Borrow's property, was let on lease to a farmer.[186] The cottage, however, was an extremely pleasant residence with a lawn running down to the river. A more substantial house has been built on this site since Borrow's day. The summer-house is generally assumed to be the same, but has certainly been reroofed since the time when Henrietta Clarke drew the picture of it that is reproduced in this book. Probably the whole summer-house is new, but at any rate the present structure stands on the site of the old one. Here Borrow did his work, wrote and wrote and wrote, until he had, as he said, 'Mountains of manuscripts.' Here first of all he completed The Zincali (1841), commenced in Seville; then he wrote or rather arranged The Bible in Spain (1843), and then at long intervals, diversified by extensive travel holidays, he wrote Lavengro (1851), The Romany Rye (1857), and Wild Wales (1860),—these are the five books and their dates that we most associate[Pg 306] with Borrow's sojourn at Oulton. When Wild Wales was published he had removed to London. Borrow brought with him to Oulton, as we have said, a beautiful Arabian horse, Sidi Habismilk, and a Jewish servant, Hayim Ben Attar. The horse remained to delight the neighbourhood. It followed Borrow like a dog when he was not riding it. The Jew had soon had enough of this rural retreat and sighed for a sunnier clime. Thus, under date 1843, I find among my Borrow Papers the following letter to a firm of shipbrokers:

To Messrs. Nickols and Marshal, London.

4th July 1843.

G. H. Borrow.[187]

Then we have the following document with which his cautious master provided himself:

W. M. Hammond, Magistrate for Great Yarmouth.
[Pg 308]

I find a letter among my Papers which bears no name, and is probably a draft. It contains an interesting reference to Hayim Ben Attar, and hence I give it here:

George Borrow.

I find also in this connection a letter from Tangier addressed to 'Mr. H. George Borrow' under date 2nd November 1847. It tells us that the worthy Jew longs once again to see the 'dear face' of his master. Since he left his service he has married and has two sons, but he is anxious to return to England if that same master will find him work. We can imagine that by this time Borrow had had enough of Hayim Ben Attar, and that his answer was not encouraging.

But by far the best glimpses of Borrow during these years of Suffolk life are those contained in a letter contributed by his friend, Elizabeth Harvey, to The Eastern Daily Press of Norwich over the initials 'E.H.':[188]

It is refreshing to read this tribute, from which I have omitted nothing salient, because a very disagreeable Borrow has somehow grown up into a tradition. I note in reading some of the reviews of Dr. Knapp's Life that he is charged, or half-charged, with suppressing[Pg 312] facts, 'because they do not reflect credit upon the subject of his biography.' Now, there were really no facts to suppress. Borrow was at times a very irritable man, he was a very self-centred one. His egotism might even be pronounced amazing by those who had never met an author. But those of us who have, recognise that with very few exceptions they are all egotists, although some conceal it from the unobservant more deftly than others. Let me recall Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson's verses on 'My Poet.'

Many successful and unsuccessful authors, living and dead, are here described, and Borrow was far from one of the worst. He was quarrelsome, and I rather like him for that. If he was a good hater he was also a very loyal friend, as we find Miss Elizabeth Harvey and, in after years, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton testifying. Moreover, Borrow had a grievance of a kind that has not often befallen a man of his literary power. He had written a great book in Lavengro, and the[Pg 313] critics and the public refused to recognise that it was a great book. Many authors of power have died young and unrecognised; but recognition has usually come to those men of genius who have lived into middle age. It did not come to Borrow. He had therefore a right to be soured. This sourness found expression in many ways. Borrow, most sound of churchmen, actually quarrelled with his vicar over the tempers of their respective dogs. Both the vicar, the Rev. Edwin Proctor Denniss, and his parishioner wrote one another acrid letters. Here is Borrow's parting shot:

Surely that is a kind of quarrel we have all had in our day, and we think ourselves none the less virtuous in consequence. Then there was Borrow's very natural ambition to be made a magistrate of Suffolk. He tells Mr. John Murray in 1842 that he has caught a bad cold by getting up at night in pursuit of poachers and thieves. 'A terrible neighbourhood this,' he adds, 'not a magistrate dare do his duty.' And so in the next year he wrote again to the same correspondent:

Mr. Gladstone, although he had admired The Bible in Spain, and indeed had even suggested the modification of one of its sentences, did nothing. Lockhart,[Pg 314] Lord Clarendon, and others who were applied to were equally powerless or indifferent. Borrow never got his magistracy. To-day no man of equal eminence in literature could possibly have failed of so slight an ambition. Moreover, Borrow wanted to be a J.P., not from mere snobbery as many might, but for a definite, practical object. I am afraid he would not have made a very good magistrate, and perhaps inquiry had made that clear to the authorities. Lastly, there was Borrow's quarrel with the railway which came through his estate. He had thoughts of removing to Bury, where Dr. Hake lived, or to Troston Hall, once the home of the interesting Capell Lofft. But he was not to leave Oulton. In intervals of holidays, journeys, and of sojourn in Yarmouth it was to remain his home to the end. In 1849 his mother joined him at Oulton. She had resided for thirty-three years at the Willow Lane Cottage. She was now seventy-seven years of age. She lived-on near her son as a tenant of his tenant at Oulton Hall until her death nine years later, dying in 1858 in her eighty-seventh year. She lies buried in Oulton Churchyard, with a tomb thus inscribed:

During these years at Oulton we have many glimpses of Borrow. Dr. Jessopp, for example, has recorded in The Athenæum[191] newspaper his own hero-worship[Pg 315] for the author of Lavengro, whom he was never to meet. This enthusiasm for Lavengro was shared by certain of his Norfolk friends of those days:

[Pg 316]

Mr. Arthur W. Upcher of Sheringham Hall, Cromer, also provided in The Athenæum[192] a quaint reminiscence of Borrow in which he recalled that Lavengro had called upon Miss Anna Gurney. This lady had, assuredly with less guile, treated him much as Frances Cobbe would have done. She had taken down an Arabic grammar, and put it into his hand, asking for explanation of some difficult point which he tried to decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously. 'I could not,' said Borrow, 'study the Arabic grammar and listen to her at the same time, so I threw down the book and ran out of the room.' He soon after met Mr. Upcher, to whom he made an interesting revelation:

Mr. William Mackay, who now lives at Oulton Broad, where he has heard all the village gossip about Borrow and his ménage, and we may hope has discounted it fully, furnishes me with the following impression of Borrow, which is of a much later date than those I have just given:

At one moment of the correspondence we obtain an interesting glimpse of a great man of science. Mr.[Pg 318] Darwin sent the following inquiry through Dr. Hooker, afterwards Sir Joseph Hooker, and it reached Borrow through his friend Thomas Brightwell:

C. Darwin.

FACSIMILE OF A COMMUNICATION FROM CHARLES DARWIN TO GEORGE BORROW.

Borrow took constant holidays during these Oulton days. We have elsewhere noted his holidays in Eastern Europe, in the Isle of Man, in Wales, and in Cornwall. Letters from other parts of England would be welcome,[Pg 319] but I can only find two, and these are but scraps. Both are addressed to his wife, each without date:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Oxford, Feb. 2nd.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

Tunbridge Wells, Tuesday evening.

George Borrow.

One of the very last letters of Borrow that I possess is to an unknown correspondent. It is from a rough 'draft' in his handwriting:

Oulton, Lowestoft, May 1875.

George Borrow.

[Pg 321]

CHAPTER XXIX

IN SCOTLAND AND IRELAND

Borrow has himself given us—in Lavengro—a picturesque record of his early experiences in Scotland. It is passing strange that he published no account of his two visits to the North in maturer years. Why did he not write Wild Scotland as a companion volume to Wild Wales? He preserved in little leather pocket-books or leather-covered exercise-books copious notes of both tours. Two of his notebooks came into the possession of the late Dr. Knapp, Borrow's first biographer, and are thus described in his Bibliography:

Of these Dr. Knapp made use only to give the routes of Borrow's journeys so far as he was able to interpret them. It may be that he was doubtful as to whether his purchase of the manuscript carried with it the copyright of its contents, as it assuredly did not; it may be that he quailed before the minute and almost undecipherable handwriting. But similar notebooks are in my possession, and there are, happily, in these[Pg 322] days typists—you pay them by the hour, and it means an infinity of time and patience—who will copy the most minute and the most obscure documents. There are some of the notebooks of the Scottish tour of 1858 before me, and what is of far more importance—Borrow's letters to his wife while on this tour. Borrow lost his mother in August 1858, and this event was naturally a great blow to his heart. A week or two later he suffered a cruel blow to his pride also, nothing less than the return of the manuscript of his much-prized translation from the Welsh of The Sleeping Bard—and this by his 'prince of publishers,' John Murray. 'There is no money in it,' said the publisher, and he was doubtless right.[193] The two disasters were of different character, but both unhinged him. He had already written Wild Wales, although it was not to be published for another four years. He had caused to be advertised—in 1857—a book on Cornwall, but it was never written in any definitive form, and now our author had lost heart, and the Cornish book—Penquite and Pentyre—and the Scots book never saw the light. In these autumn months of 1858 geniality and humour had parted from Borrow; this his diary makes clear. He was ill. His wife urged a tour in Scotland, and he prepared himself for a rough, simple journey, of a kind quite different from the one in Wales. The north of Scotland in the winter was scarcely to be thought of for his wife and stepdaughter Henrietta. He tells us in one of these diaries that he walked 'several hundred miles in the Highlands.' His wife and daughter were with him in[Pg 323] Wales, as every reader of Wild Wales will recall, but the Scots tour was meant to be a more formidable pilgrimage, and they went to Great Yarmouth instead. The first half of the tour—that of September—is dealt with in letters to his wife, the latter half is reflected in his diary. The letters show Borrow's experiences in the earlier part of his journey, and from his diaries we learn that he was in Oban on 22nd October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns, Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of December—altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and visits a desolate churchyard, Coll Harrie, to see the tomb of John Macdonnel or Ian Lom:

He passed through Scotland in a disputative vein, which could not have made him a popular traveller. He tells a Roman Catholic of the Macdonnel clan to read his Bible and 'trust in Christ, not in the Virgin Mary and graven images.' He went up to another man who accosted him with the remark that 'It is a soft day,' and said, 'You should not say a "soft" day, but a wet day.' Even the Spanish, for whom he had so much contempt and scorn when he returned from the Peninsula, are 'in many things a wise people'—after his experiences of the Scots. There is abundance of Borrow's prejudice, intolerance, and charm in this fragment of a diary[194]; but the extract I have given is of additional interest as showing how Borrow wrote all his books. The notebooks that he wrote in Spain and Wales were made up of similar disjointed jottings. Here is a note of more human character interspersed with Borrow's diatribes upon the surliness of the Scots. He is at Invergarry, on the Banks of Loch Oich. It is the 5th of October:

But the letters to Mrs. Borrow are the essential documents here, and not the copious diaries which I hope to publish elsewhere. The first letter to 'Carreta' is from Edinburgh, where Borrow arrived on Sunday, 19th September 1858:

To Mrs. George Borrow, 38 Camperdown Place, Yarmouth, Norfolk

Edinburgh, Sunday (Sept. 19th, 1858).

George Borrow.

In his unpublished diary Borrow records his journey from Glasgow through beautiful but over-described scenery to Inverness, where he stayed at the Caledonian Hotel:

To Mrs. George Borrow, 38 Camperdown Place, Yarmouth

Inverness, Sunday (Sept. 26th).

George Borrow.

'Swindled out of a shilling by rascally ferryman,' is Borrow's note in his diary of the episode that he relates to his wife of crossing the Firth. He does not tell her, but his diary tells us, that he changed his inn on the day he wrote this letter: the following jottings from the diary cover the period:

But to return to Borrow's letters to his wife:

To Mrs. George Borrow, 38 Camperdown Terrace, Gt. Yarmouth

Inverness, September 29th, 1858.

To Mrs. George Borrow, 39 Camperdown Terrace, Gt. Yarmouth

Inverness, 30th September 1858.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow, 39 Camperdown Terrace, Gt. Yarmouth

Fort Augustus, Sunday, October 17th, 1858.

George Borrow.
[Pg 331]

To Mrs. George Borrow, 39 Camperdown Terrace, Yarmouth

(Fragment? undated.)

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow, 39 Camperdown Terrace, Yarmouth, Norfolk

Inverness, Nov. 7th, 1858.

George Borrow.

I do not possess any diaries or notebooks covering the period of the following letters. The diary which covers this period is mentioned in the bibliography attached to Dr. Knapp's Life of Borrow, which, with the rest of Dr. Knapp's Borrow papers, is now in the possession of the Hispanic Society, New York.

Thurso, 21st Nov. 1858.

George Borrow.

Kirkwall, Orkney, November 27th, 1858. Saturday.

[Pg 334]

George Borrow.

Stirling, Dec. 14th, 1858.

George Borrow.

In spite of Borrow's vow never to visit Scotland again, he was there eight years later—in 1866—but only in the lowlands. His stepdaughter, Hen., or Henrietta Clarke, had married Dr. MacOubrey, of Belfast, and Borrow and his wife went on a visit to the pair. But the incorrigible vagabond in Borrow was forced to declare itself, and leaving his wife and daughter in Belfast he crossed to Stranraer by steamer on 17th July 1866, and tramped through the lowlands, visiting Ecclefechan and Gretna Green. We have no record of his experiences at these places. The only literary impression of the Scots tour of 1866, apart from a brief reference in Dr. Knapp's Life, is an essay on Kirk Yetholm in Romano Lavo-Lil. We would gladly[Pg 336] have exchanged it for an account of his visits to Abbotsford and Melrose, two places which he saw in August of this year.

In his letter of 27th November from Kirkwall it will be seen that Borrow records the kindness received from 'a young gentleman of the name of Petrie.' It is pleasant to find that when he returned to England he did not forget that kindness, as the next letter demonstrates:

To George Petrie, Esq., Kirkwall

39 Camperdown Place, Yarmouth, Jany. 14, 1859.

George Borrow.

On the same day that Borrow wrote, Mr. Petrie sent his acknowledgment of the books, and so the letters crossed:

My last glimpse of George Borrow in Scotland during his memorable trip of the winter of 1858 is contained in a letter that I received some time ago from the Rev. J. Wilcock of St. Ringan's Manse, Lerwick, which runs as follows:

Nov. 18th, 1903.

In addition to the visit to Belfast in 1866, Borrow was in Ireland the year following his Scots tour of 1858, that is to say from July to November 1859. He went, accompanied by his wife and daughter, by Holyhead to Dublin, where, as Dr. Knapp has discovered, they resided at 75 St. Stephen Green, South. Borrow, as was his custom, left his family while he was on a walking tour which included Connemara and on northward to the Giant's Causeway. He was keenly interested in the two Societies in Dublin engaged upon the study of ancient Irish literature, and he became a member of the Ossianic Society in July of this year. I have a number of Borrow's translations from the Irish in my possession, but no notebooks of his tour on this occasion.

All Irishmen who wish their country to preserve its individuality should have a kindly feeling for George[Pg 340] Borrow. Opposed as he was to the majority of the people in religion and in politics, he was about the only Englishman of his time who took an interest in their national literature, language and folk-lore. Had he written such another travel book about Ireland as he wrote about Wales he would certainly have added to the sum of human pleasure.

I find only one letter to his wife during this Irish journey:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Ballina, County Mayo, Thursday Morning.

George Borrow.

[Pg 341]

CHAPTER XXX

THE ROMANY RYE

George Borrow's three most important books had all a very interesting history. We have seen the processes by which The Bible in Spain was built up from notebooks and letters. We have seen further the most curious apprenticeship by which Lavengro came into existence. The most distinctly English book—at least in a certain absence of cosmopolitanism—that Victorian literature produced was to a great extent written on scraps of paper during a prolonged Continental tour which included Constantinople and Budapest. In Lavengro we have only half a book, the whole work, which included what came to be published as The Romany Rye, having been intended to appear in four volumes. The first volume was written in 1843, the second in 1845, after the Continental tour, which is made use of in the description of the Hungarian, and the third volume in the years between 1845 and 1848. Then in 1852 Borrow wrote out an 'advertisement' of a fourth volume,[198] which runs as follows:

[Pg 342]

But this volume did not make an appearance 'shortly.' Its author was far too much offended with the critics, too disheartened it may be to care to offer himself again for their gibes. The years rolled on, much of the time being spent at Yarmouth, a little of it at Oulton. There was a visit to Cornwall in 1854, and another to Wales in the same year. The Isle of Man was selected for a holiday in 1855, and not until 1857 did The Romany Rye appear. The book was now in two volumes, and we see that the word Romany had dropped an 'm':

Dr. Knapp publishes some vigorous correspondence between Mrs. Borrow and her husband's publisher written prior to the issue of The Romany Rye. 'Mr. Borrow has not the slightest wish to publish the book,' she says. 'The manuscript was left with you because you wished to see it.'[199] This was written in 1855, the wife presumably writing at her husband's dictation. In 1857 the situation was not improved, as Borrow himself writes to Mr. Murray: 'In your last letter you talk of obliging me by publishing my verse. Now is not that speaking very injudiciously?'[200] At last, however, in[Pg 343] April 1857, The Romany Rye appeared, and we are introduced once more to many old favourites, to Petulengro, to the Man in Black, and above all to Isopel Berners. The incidents of Lavengro are supposed to have taken place between the 24th May 1825 and the 18th July of that year. In The Romany Rye the incidents apparently occur between 19th July and 3rd August 1825. In the opinion of that most eminent of gypsy experts, Mr. John Sampson,[201] the whole of the episodes in the five volumes occurred in seventy-two days. Mr. Sampson agrees with Dr. Knapp in locating Mumper's Dingle in Momber or Monmer Lane, Willenhall,[Pg 344] Shropshire. The dingle has disappeared—it is now occupied by the Monmer Lane Ironworks—but you may still find Dingle Bridge and Dingle Lane. The book has added to the glamour of gypsydom, and to the interest in the gypsies which we all derive from Lavengro, but Mr. Sampson makes short work of Borrow's gypsy learning on its philological side. 'No gypsy,' he says, 'ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.' 'Borrow's genders are perversely incorrect'; and 'Romany'—a word which can never get out of our language, let philologists say what they will—should have been 'Romani.' '"Haarsträubend" is the fitting epithet,' says Mr. Sampson, 'which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow's etymologies.' But all this is very unimportant, and the book remains in the whole of its forty-seven chapters not one whit less a joy to us than does its predecessor Lavengro, with its visions of gypsies and highwaymen and boxers.

But then there is its 'Appendix.' That appendix of eleven petulant chapters undoubtedly did Borrow harm in his day and generation. Now his fame is too great, and his genius too firmly established for these strange dissertations on men and things to offer anything but amusement or edification. They reveal, for example, the singularly non-literary character of this great man of letters. Much—too much—has been made of his dislike of Walter Scott and his writings. As a matter of fact Borrow tells us that he admired Scott both as a prose writer and as a poet. 'Since Scott he had read no modern writer. Scott was greater than Homer,' he told Frances Cobbe. But he takes occasion to condemn his 'Charlie o'er the water nonsense,' and[Pg 345] declares that his love of and sympathy with certain periods and incidents have made for sympathy with what he always calls 'Popery.'[202] Well, looking at the matter from an entirely opposite point of view, Cardinal Newman declared that the writings of Scott had had no inconsiderable influence in directing his mind towards the Church of Rome.[203]

[Pg 346]

FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE ROMANY RYE From the Borrow Papers in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle'

And thus we see that Borrow had a certain prescience in this matter. But Borrow, in good truth, cared little for modern English literature. His heart was entirely with the poets of other lands—the Scandinavians and the Kelts. In Virgil he apparently took little interest, nor in the great poetry of Greece, Rome and England, although we find a reference to Theocritus and Dante in his books. Fortunately for his fame he had read Gil Blas, Don Quixote, and, above all, Robinson Crusoe, which last book, first read as a boy of six, coloured his whole life. Defoe and Fielding and Bunyan were the English authors to whom he owed most. Of Byron he has quaint things to say, and of Wordsworth things that are neither quaint nor wise. We recall the man in the field in the twenty-second chapter of The[Pg 347] Romany Rye who used Wordsworth's poetry as a soporific. And throughout his life Borrow's position towards his contemporaries in literature was ever contemptuous. He makes no mention of Carlyle or Ruskin or Matthew Arnold, and they in their turn, it may be added, make no mention of him or of his works. Thackeray he snubbed on one of the few occasions they met, and Browning and Tennyson were alike unrevealed to him. Borrow indeed stands quite apart from the great literature of a period in which he was a striking and individual figure. Lacking appreciation in this sphere of work, he wrote of 'the contemptible trade of author,' counting it less creditable than that of a jockey.

But all this is a digression from the progress of our narrative of the advent of The Romany Rye. The book was published in an edition of 1000 copies in April 1857, and it took thirty years to dispose of 3750 copies. Not more than 2000 copies of his book were sold in Great Britain during the twenty-three remaining years of Borrow's life. What wonder that he was embittered by his failure! The reviews were far from favourable, although Mr. Elwin wrote not unkindly in an article in the Quarterly Review called 'Roving Life in England.' No critic, however, was as severe as The Athenæum, which had called Lavengro 'balderdash' and referred to The Romany Rye as the 'literary dough' of an author 'whose dullest gypsy preparation we have now read.' In later years, when, alas! it was too late, The Athenæum, through the eloquent pen of Theodore Watts, made good amends. But William Bodham Donne wrote to Borrow with adequate enthusiasm:[Pg 348]

To George Borrow, Esq.

12 St. James's Square, May 24th, 1857.

Wm. B. Donne.

And perhaps a letter from the then Town Clerk of Oxford is worth reproducing here:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Town Clerk's Office, Oxford, 19th August 1857.

[Pg 349]

George P. Hester.

In spite of contemporary criticism, The Romany Rye is a great book, or rather it contains the concluding chapters of a great book. Sequels are usually proclaimed to be inferior to their predecessors. But The Romany Rye is not a sequel. It is part of Lavengro, and is therefore Borrow's most imperishable monument.

[Pg 350]

CHAPTER XXXI.

EDWARD FITZGERALD

Edward FitzGerald once declared that he was about the only friend with whom Borrow had never quarrelled.[205] There was probably no reason for this exceptional amity other than the 'genius for friendship' with which FitzGerald has been rightly credited. There were certainly, however, many points of likeness between the two men which might have kept them at peace. Both had written copiously and out of all proportion to the public demand for their work. Both revelled in translation. FitzGerald's eight volumes in a magnificent American edition consists mainly of translations from various tongues which no man presumably now reads. All the world has read and will long continue to read his translation or paraphrase of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát. 'Old Fitz,' as his friends called him, lives by that, although his letters are among the best in literature. Borrow wrote four books that will live, but had publishers been amenable he would have published forty, and all as unsaleable as the major part of FitzGerald's translations. Both men were Suffolk squires, and yet delighted more in the company of a class other than their own, FitzGerald of boatmen, Borrow of gypsies; both were counted eccentrics in their respective villages. Perhaps alone[Pg 351] among the great Victorian authors they lived to be old without receiving in their lives any popular recognition of their great literary achievements. But FitzGerald had a more cultivated mind than Borrow. He loved literature and literary men whilst Borrow did not. His criticism of books is of the best, and his friendships with bookmen are among the most interesting in literary history. 'A solitary, shy, kind-hearted man,' was the verdict upon him of the frequently censorious Carlyle. When Anne Thackeray asked her father which of his friends he had loved best, he answered 'Dear old Fitz, to be sure,' and Tennyson would have said the same. Borrow had none of these gifts as a letter-writer and no genius for friendship. The charm of his style, so indisputable in his best work, is absent from his letters; and his friends were alienated one after another. Borrow's undisciplined intellect and narrow upbringing were a curse to him, from the point of view of his own personal happiness, although they helped him to achieve exactly the work for which he was best fitted. Borrow's acquaintance with FitzGerald was commenced by the latter, who, in July 1853, sent from Boulge Hall, Suffolk, to Oulton Hall, in the same county, his recently published volume Six Dramas of Calderon. He apologises for making so free with 'a great man; but, as usual, I shall feel least fear before a man like yourself who both do fine things in your own language and are deep read in those of others.' He also refers to 'our common friend Donne,' so that it is probable that they had met at Donne's house.[206] The next letter, also published by Dr. Knapp, that FitzGerald writes to Borrow is dated from his home in Great Portland[Pg 352] Street in 1856. He presents his friend with a Turkish Dictionary, and announces his coming marriage to Miss Barton, 'Our united ages amount to 96!—a dangerous experiment on both sides'—as it proved. The first reference to Borrow in the FitzGerald Letters issued by his authorised publishers is addressed to Professor Cowell in January 1857:

But Borrow's genius if not his taste was always admired by FitzGerald, as the following letter among my Borrow Papers clearly indicates. Borrow had published The Romany Rye at the beginning of May:

[Pg 352a]

OULTON COTTAGE FROM THE BROAD

Showing the summer house on the left from a sketch by Henrietta MacOubrey. The house which has replaced it has another aspect.

THE SUMMER HOUSE OULTON, AS IT IS TO DAY

Which when compared with Miss MacOubrey's sketch shows that it has been reroofed and probably rebuilt altogether.

[Pg 353]

To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall.

Goldington Hall, Bedford, May 24/57[208]

[209]

and am yours very truly,
Edward FitzGerald.
[Pg 354]

In a letter to Cowell about the same time—June 5, 1857—FitzGerald writes that he is about to set out for Gorleston, Great Yarmouth:

It was Cowell, it will be remembered, who introduced FitzGerald to the Persian poet Omar, and afterwards regretted the act. The first edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám appeared two years later, in 1859. Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and he was educated at the Ipswich Grammar School. It was in the library attached to the Ipswich Library Institution that Cowell commenced the study of Oriental languages. In 1842 he entered the business of his father and grandfather as a merchant and maltster. When only twenty years of age he commenced his friendship with Edward FitzGerald, and their correspondence may be found in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Correspondence. In 1850 he left his brother to carry on the business and entered himself[Pg 355] at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he passed six years. At intervals he read Greek with FitzGerald and, later, Persian. FitzGerald commenced to learn this last language, which was to bring him fame, when he was forty-four years of age. In 1856 Cowell was appointed to a Professorship of English History at Calcutta, and from there he sent FitzGerald a copy of the manuscript of Omar Khayyám, afterwards lent by FitzGerald to Borrow. Much earlier than this—in 1853—FitzGerald had written to Borrow:

Twenty-six years afterwards—in 1879—we find FitzGerald writing to Dr. Aldis Wright to the effect that Cowell had been seized with 'a wish to learn Welsh under George Borrow':

This introduction and meeting are described by Professor Cowell in the following letter:[213]

Cambridge, December 10, 1892.

[Pg 356]

E. B. Cowell.

There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright's FitzGerald Letters. It is dated June 1857 and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar Khayyám, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his 'peccadilloes[Pg 358] in verse' as he calls his remarkable translation,[214] and this two years after it was published. A letter, dated July 6, 1857,[215] asks for the return of FitzGerald's copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar Khayyám, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript. This letter concludes on a pathetic note:

Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald's great translation of Omar Khayyám, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the

to quote Tennyson's famous eulogy. Cowell, to his after regret, for he had none of FitzGerald's dolce far niente paganism, had sent FitzGerald from Calcutta, where he was, the manuscript of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát in Persian, and FitzGerald was captured by it. Two years later, as we know, he produced the translation, which was so much more than a translation. 'Omar breathes a sort of consolation to me,' he wrote to Cowell. 'Borrow is greatly delighted with your MS. of Omar which I showed him,' he says in another letter to Cowell (June 23, 1857), 'delighted at the terseness so unusual in Oriental verse.'[216]

[Pg 359]The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the Rubáiyát:

To George Borrow, Esq.

10 Marine Parade, Lowestoft.

Edward FitzGerald.

To George Borrow, Esq.

Bath House, Lowestoft, October 10/59.

[Pg 360]

Edward FitzGerald.

In a letter to George Crabbe the third, and the grandson of the poet, in 1862, FitzGerald tells him that he has just been reading Borrow's Wild Wales, 'which I like well because I can hear him talking it. But I don't know if others will like it.' 'No one writes better English than Borrow in general,' he says. But FitzGerald, as a lover of style, is vexed with some of Borrow's phrases, and instances one: '"The scenery was beautiful to a degree," What degree? When did this vile phrase arise?' The criticism is just, but Borrow, in common with many other great English authors whose work will live was not uniformly a good stylist. He has many lamentable fallings away from the ideals of the stylist. But he will, by virtue of a wonderful individuality, outlive many a good stylist. His four great books are immortal, and one of them is Wild Wales.

We have a glimpse of FitzGerald in the following letter in my possession, by the friend who had[Pg 361] introduced him to Borrow, William Bodham Donne:[217]

To George Borrow, Esq.

40 Weymouth Street, Portland Place, W., November 28/62.

W. B. Donne.

The last letter from FitzGerald to Borrow is dated many years after the correspondence I have here printed,[219] and from it we gather that there had been no correspondence in the interval.[220] FitzGerald writes from Little Grange, Woodbridge, in January 1875, to say that he had received a message from Borrow that he would be glad to see him at Oulton. 'I think the more of it,' says FitzGerald, 'because I imagine, from what I have heard, that you have slunk away from human company as much as I have.' He hints that they might not like one another so well after a fifteen years' separation. He declares with infinite pathos that he has now severed himself from all old ties, has refused the invitations of old college friends and old schoolfellows. To him there was no companionship possible for his declining days other than his reflections and verses. It is a fine letter,[Pg 363] filled with that graciousness of spirit that was ever a trait in FitzGerald's noble nature. The two men never met again. When Borrow died, in 1881, FitzGerald, who followed him two years later, suggested to Dr. Aldis Wright, afterwards to be his (FitzGerald's) executor, who was staying with him at the time, that he should look over Borrow's books and manuscripts if his stepdaughter so desired. If this had been arranged, and Dr. Aldis Wright had written Borrow's life, there would have been no second biographer.[221]

[Pg 364]

CHAPTER XXXII

WILD WALES

The year 1854 was an adventurous one in Borrow's life, for he, so essentially a Celt, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has more than once reminded us,[222] had in that year two interesting experiences of the 'Celtic Fringe.' He spent the first months of the year in Cornwall, as we have seen, and from July to November he was in Wales. That tour he recorded in pencilled notebooks, four of which are in the Knapp Collection in New York, and are duly referred to in Dr. Knapp's biography, and two of which are in my possession. In addition to this I have the complete manuscript of Wild Wales in Borrow's handwriting, and many variants of it in countless, carefully written pages. Therein lie the possibilities of a singularly interesting edition of Wild Wales should opportunity offer for its publication. When I examine the manuscript, with its demonstration of careful preparation, I do not wonder that it took Borrow eight years—from 1854 to 1862—to prepare this book for the press. Assuredly we recognise here, as in all his books, that he realised Carlyle's definition of genius—'the[Pg 365] transcendent capacity of taking trouble—first of all.'

WILD WALES IN ITS BEGINNINGS.

Two pages from one of George Borrow's Pocket-books with pencilled notes made on his journey through Wales.

It was on 27th July 1854 that Borrow, his wife and her daughter, Henrietta Clarke, set out on their journey to North Wales. Dr. Knapp prints two kindly letters from Mrs. Borrow to her mother-in-law written from Llangollen on this tour. 'We are in a lovely quiet spot,' she writes, 'Dear George goes out exploring the mountains.... The poor here are humble, simple,[Pg 366] and good.' In the second letter Mrs. Borrow records that her husband 'keeps a daily journal of all that goes on, so that he can make a most amusing book in a month.' Yet Borrow took eight years to make it. The failure of The Romany Rye, which was due for publication before Wild Wales, accounts for this, and perhaps also the disappointment that another book, long since ready, did not find a publisher. In the letter from which I have quoted Mary Borrow tells Anne Borrow that her son will, she expects at Christmas, publish The Romany Rye, 'together with his poetry in all the European languages.' This last book had been on his hands for many a day, and indeed in Wild Wales he writes of 'a mountain of unpublished translations' of which this book, duly advertised in The Romany Rye, was a part.[223]

After an ascent of Snowdon arm in arm with Henrietta, Mrs. Borrow remaining behind, Borrow left his wife and daughter to find their way back to Yarmouth, and continued his journey, all of which is most picturesquely described in Wild Wales. Before that book was published, however, Borrow was to visit the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Ireland. He was to publish Lavengro (1857); to see his mother die (1858); and to issue his very limited edition of The Sleeping Bard (1860); and, lastly, to remove to Brompton (1860). It was at the end of the year 1862 that Wild Wales was published. It had been written during the two years immediately following the tour in Wales, in 1855 and 1856. It had been announced as ready for publication in 1857, but doubtless the chilly reception[Pg 367] of The Romany Rye in that year, of which we have written, had made Borrow lukewarm as to venturing once more before the public. The public was again irresponsive. The Cornhill Magazine, then edited by Thackeray, declared the book to be 'tiresome reading.' The Spectator reviewer was more kindly, but nowhere was there any enthusiasm. Only a thousand copies were sold,[224] and a second edition did not appear until 1865, and not another until seven years after Borrow's death. Yet the author had the encouragement that comes from kindly correspondents. Here, for example, is a letter that could not but have pleased him:

West Hill Lodge, Highgate,
Dec. 29th, 1862.

Mary Howitt.[225]

[Pg 368]

FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF WILD WALES

From the original Manuscript in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle.'

[Pg 369]

The reference to Lope de Vega's ghost story is due to the fact that in the fifty-fifth chapter of Wild Wales, Borrow, after declaring that Lope de Vega was 'one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived,' added, that among his tales may be found 'the best ghost story in the world.' Dr. Knapp found the story in Borrow's handwriting among the manuscripts that came to him, and gives it in full. In good truth it is but moderately interesting, although Borrow seems to have told it to many audiences when in Wales, but this perhaps provides the humour of the situation. It seems clear that Borrow contemplated publishing Lope de Vega's ghost story in a later book. We note here, indeed, a letter of a much later date in which Borrow refers to the possibility of a supplement to Wild Wales, the only suggestion of such a book that I have seen, although there is plenty of new manuscript in my Borrow collection to have made such a book possible had Borrow been encouraged by his publisher and the public to write it.[Pg 370]

FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST PAGE OF WILD WALES

From the original Manuscript in the possession of the Author of 'George Borrow and his Circle.'

To J. Evan Williams, Esq.

22 Hereford Square, Brompton, Decr. 31, 1863.

Another letter that Borrow owed to his Wild Wales may well have place here. It will be recalled that in his fortieth chapter he waxes enthusiastic over Lewis Morris, the Welsh bard, who was born in Anglesey in 1700 and died in 1765. Morris's great-grandson, Sir Lewis Morris (1833-1907), the author of the once popular Epic of Hades, was twenty-nine years of age when he wrote to Borrow as follows:—

To George Borrow, Esq.

Reform Club, Dec. 29, 1862.

Lewis Morris.

An interesting letter to Borrow from another once popular writer belongs to this period:

To George Borrow, Esq.

The 'Press' Office, Strand, Westminster, Thursday.

[Pg 373]

Mortimer Collins.[226]

How greatly Borrow was disappointed at the comparative failure of Wild Wales may be gathered from a curt message to his publisher which I find among his papers:

Borrow, it will be remembered, left Wales at Chepstow, as recorded in the hundred and ninth and final chapter of Wild Wales, 'where I purchased a first class ticket, and ensconcing myself in a comfortable carriage, was soon on my way to London, where I arrived at about four o'clock in the morning.' In the[Pg 374] following letter to his wife there is a slight discrepancy, of no importance, as to time:

To Mrs. George Borrow

53a Pall Mall, London.

George Borrow.

Before Borrow put the finishing touches to Wild Wales he repeated his visit of 1854. This was in 1857, the year of The Romany Rye. Dr. Knapp records the fact through a letter to Mr. John Murray from Shrewsbury, in which he discusses the possibility of a second edition of The Romany Rye: 'I have lately been taking a walk in Wales of upwards of five hundred miles,' he writes. This tour lasted from August 23rd to October 5th. I find four letters to his wife that were written in this holiday. He does not seem to have made any use of this second tour in his Wild Wales, although I have abundance of manuscript notes upon it in my possession.[Pg 375]

To Mrs. George Borrow

Tenby, Tuesday, 25.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

Trecastle, Brecknockshire, South Wales, August 17th.

To Mrs. George Borrow

Lampeter, 3rd September 1857.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

Presteyne, Radnorshire, Monday morning.

G. Borrow.

In Wild Wales we have George Borrow in his most genial mood. There are none of the hairbreadth escapes and grim experiences of The Bible in Spain, none of the romance and the glamour of Lavengro and its sequel, but there is good humour, a humour that does not obtain in the three more important works, and there is an amazing amount of frank candour of a biographical kind. We even have a reference to Isopel Berners, referred to by Captain Bosvile as 'the young woman you used to keep company with ... a fine young woman and a virtuous.' It is the happiest of Borrow's books, and not unnaturally. He was having a genuine holiday, and he had the companionship during a part of it of his wife and daughter, of whom he was, as this book is partly written to prove, very genuinely fond. He also enjoyed the singularly felicitous experience of[Pg 377] harking back upon some of his earliest memories. He was able to retrace the steps he took in the Welsh language during his boyhood:

It is in this ecstatic mood that he passes through Wales. Let me recall the eulogy on 'Gronwy' Owen, and here it may be said that Borrow rarely got his spelling correct of the proper names of his various literary heroes, in the various Norse and Celtic tongues in which he delighted.[227] But how much Borrow delighted in his poets may be seen by his eulogy on Goronwy Owen, which in its pathos recalls Carlyle's similar eulogies over poor German scholars who interested him, Jean Paul Richter and Heyne, for example. Borrow ignored Owen's persistent intemperance and general impracticability. Here and here only, indeed, does he remind one of Carlyle.[228] He had a great capacity for hero-worship, although the two were not interested in the same heroes. His hero-worship of Owen took him over large tracks of country in search of that poet's[Pg 378] birthplace. He writes of the delight he takes in inspecting the birth-places and haunts of poets. 'It is because I am fond of poetry, poets, and their haunts, that I am come to Anglesey.'[229] 'I proceeded on my way,' he says elsewhere, 'in high spirits indeed, having now seen not only the tomb of the Tudors, but one of those sober poets for which Anglesey has always been so famous.' And thus it is that Wild Wales is a high-spirited book, which will always be a delight and a joy not only to Welshmen, who, it may be hoped, have by this time forgiven 'the ecclesiastical cat' of Llangollen, but to all who rejoice in the great classics of the English tongue.

[Pg 379]

CHAPTER XXXIII

LIFE IN LONDON, 1860-1874

George Borrow's earlier visits to London are duly recorded, with that glamour of which he was a master, in the pages of Lavengro. Who can cross London Bridge even to-day without thinking of the apple-woman and her copy of Moll Flanders; and many passages of Borrow's great book make a very special appeal to the lover of London. Then there was that visit to the Bible Society's office made on foot from Norwich, and the expedition a few months later to pass an examination in the Manchu language. When he became a country squire and the author of the very successful Bible in Spain Borrow frequently visited London, and his various residences may be traced from his letters. Take, for example, these five notes to his wife, the first apparently written in 1848, but all undated:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Tuesday afternoon.

To Mrs. George Borrow

53a, Pall Mall.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

Pall Mall, 53a, Saturday.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

No. 53a Pall Mall.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. George Borrow

No. 58 Jermyn Street, St. James.

[Pg 382]

G. B.

It was in the year 1843 that Borrow, on a visit to London following upon the success of The Bible in Spain, sat to Henry Wyndham Phillips for his portrait at the instigation of Mr. Murray, who gave Borrow a replica, retaining for himself Phillips's more finished picture, which has been reproduced again and again in the present Mr. Murray's Borrow productions.[230]

Borrow was in London in 1845 and again in 1848. There must have been other occasional visits on the way to this or that starting point of his annual holiday, but in 1860 Borrow took a house in London, and he resided there until 1874, when he returned to Oulton. In a letter to Mr. John Murray, written from Ireland[Pg 383] in November 1859, Mrs. Borrow writes to the effect that in the spring of the following year she will wish to look round 'and select a pleasant holiday residence within three to ten miles of London.' There is no doubt that a succession of winters on Oulton Broad had been very detrimental to Mrs. Borrow's health, although they had no effect upon Borrow, who bathed there with equal indifference in winter as in summer, having, as he tells us in Wild Wales, 'always had the health of an elephant.' And so Borrow and his wife arrived in London in June, and took temporary lodgings at 21 Montagu Street, Portman Square. In September they went into occupation of a house in Brompton—22 Hereford Square, which is now commemorated by a County Council tablet. Here Borrow resided for fourteen years, and here his wife died on January 30, 1869. She was buried in Brompton Cemetery, where Borrow was laid beside her twelve years later. For neighbour, on the one side, the Borrows had Mr. Robert Collinson and, on the other, Miss Frances Power Cobbe and her companion, Miss M. C. Lloyd. From Miss Cobbe we have occasional glimpses of Borrow, all of them unkindly. She was of Irish extraction, her father having been grandson of Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin. Miss Cobbe was an active woman in all kinds of journalistic and philanthropic enterprises in the London of the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last century, writing in particular in the now defunct newspaper, the Echo, and she wrote dozens of books and pamphlets, all of them forgotten except her Autobiography,[231] in which she devoted several[Pg 384] pages to her neighbour in Hereford Square. Borrow had no sympathy with fanatical women with many 'isms,' and the pair did not agree, although many neighbourly courtesies passed between them for a time. Here is an extract from Miss Cobbe's Autobiography:

One only needs to quote this by the light of the story as told so far in these pages to see how entirely Miss Cobbe misunderstood Borrow, or rather how little insight she was able to bring to a study of his curious character. The rest of her attempt at interpretation is largely taken up to demonstrate how much more clever and more learned she was than Borrow. Altogether it is a sorry spectacle this of the pseudo-philanthropist relating her conversations with a man broken by misfortune and the death of his wife. Many of Miss Cobbe's statements have passed into current biographies and have doubtless found acceptance.[233] I do not find[Pg 385] them convincing. Archdeacon Whately on the other hand tells us that he always found Borrow 'most civil and hospitable,' and his sister gives us the following 'impression':

Another reminiscence of Borrow in London is furnished by Mr. A. T. Story, who writes:[235]

During this sojourn in London, which was undertaken because Oulton and Yarmouth did not agree with his wife, Borrow suffered the tragedy of her loss. Borrow dragged on his existence in London for another five years, a much broken man. It is extraordinary how little we know of Borrow during that fourteen years' sojourn in London; how rarely we meet him in the literary memoirs of this period. Happily one or two pleasant friendships relieved the sadness of his days; and in particular the reminiscences of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton assist us to a more correct appreciation of the Borrow of these last years of London life. Of Mr. Watts-Dunton's 'memories,' we shall write in our next chapter. Here it remains only to note that Borrow still continued to interest himself in his various efforts at translation, and in 1861 and 1862 the editor of Once a Week printed various ballads and stories from his pen. The volumes of this periodical are before me, and I find illustrations by Sir John Millais, Sir E. J. Poynter, Simeon Solomon and George Du Maurier; stories by Mrs. Henry Wood and Harriet Martineau, and articles by Walter Thornbury.

In 1862 Wild Wales was published, as we have seen. In 1865 Henrietta married William MacOubrey, and in the following year, Borrow and his wife went to visit the pair in their Belfast home. In the beginning of the year 1869 Mrs. Borrow died, aged seventy-three. There are few records of the tragedy that are worth perpetuating.[236] Borrow consumed his own smoke. With his wife's death his life was indeed a wreck.[Pg 388] No wonder he was so 'rude' to that least perceptive of women, Miss Cobbe. Some four or five years more Borrow lingered on in London, cheered at times by walks and talks with Gordon Hake and Watts-Dunton, and he then returned to Oulton—a most friendless man:—

[Pg 389]

CHAPTER XXXIV

FRIENDS OF LATER YEARS

We should know little enough of George Borrow's later years, were it not for his friendship with Thomas Gordon Hake and Theodore Watts-Dunton. Hake was born in 1809 and died in 1895. In 1839 he settled at Bury St. Edmunds as a physician, and he resided there until 1853. Here he was frequently visited by the Borrows. We have already quoted his prophecy concerning Lavengro that 'its roots will strike deep into the soil of English letters.' In 1853 Dr. Hake and his family left Bury for the United States, where they resided for some years. Returning to England they lived at Roehampton and met Borrow occasionally in London. During these years Hake was, according to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, 'the earthly Providence of the Rossetti family,' but he was not, as his Memoirs show, equally devoted to Borrow. In 1872, however, he went to live in Germany and Italy for a considerable period. Concerning the relationship between Borrow and Hake, Mr. Watts-Dunton has written:

[Pg 392]

Mr. Watts-Dunton refers here to Hake's asperities when speaking of Borrow. They are very marked in the Memoirs of Eighty Years, and nearly all the stories of Borrow's eccentricities that have been served up to us by Borrow's biographers are due to Hake. It is here we read of his snub to Thackeray. 'Have[Pg 393] you read my Snob Papers in Punch?' Thackeray asked him. 'In Punch?' Borrow replied. 'It is a periodical I never look at.' He was equally rude, or shall we say Johnsonian, according to Hake, when Miss Agnes Strickland asked him if she might send him her Queens of England. He exclaimed, 'for God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.' Hake is responsible also for that other story about the woman who, desirous of pleasing him, said, 'Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!' On which he exclaimed, 'Pray, what books do you mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?'[238] Dr. Johnson was guilty of many such vagaries, and the readers of Boswell have forgiven him everything because they are conveyed to them through the medium of a hero-worshipper. Borrow never had a Boswell, and despised the literary class so much that he never found anything in the shape of an apologist until he had been long dead. The most competent of these, because writing from personal knowledge, was Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, who is known in literature as Theodore Watts, the author of Aylwin and The Coming of Love, and the writer of many acute and picturesque criticisms. Mr. Watts-Dunton—who added his mother's name of Dunton to his own in later life—was the son of a solicitor of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire. In early life he was himself a[Pg 394] solicitor, which profession he happily abandoned for literature. His friendship with Algernon Charles Swinburne is one of the romances of the Victorian era. His affectionate solicitude doubtless kept that great poet alive for many a year beyond what would otherwise have been his lot. Watts-Dunton was, as we have seen, introduced to Borrow by Hake. He has written a romance which, if he could be persuaded to publish it, would doubtless command the same attention as Aylwin, in which Borrow is introduced as 'Dereham' and Hake as 'Gordon,' and here he tells the story of that introduction:

I find no letter from Hake to Borrow among my papers, but three to his wife:

Bury St. Edmunds, Jan. 27, '48. Evening.

T. G. Hake.

Bury St. Edmunds, January 19th, '49.

T. G. Hake.

Bury St. Edmunds, June 24, '51.

T. G. Hake.

Mr. A. Egmont Hake, one of Dr. Hake's sons,[Pg 397] has also given us an interesting reminiscence of Borrow:[240]

To Mr. Watts-Dunton we owe by far the best description of Borrow's personal appearance:

Here is another picture by Mr. Watts-Dunton of this London period:[243]

And there is yet another description, equally illuminating, in which Mr. Watts-Dunton records how he won Borrow's heart by showing a familiarity with Douglas Jerrold's melodrama Ambrose Gwinett:

Mr. Watts-Dunton concludes his reminiscences—the most valuable personal record that we have of Borrow—with a sonnet that now has its place in literature:

[Pg 401]

CHAPTER XXXV

BORROW'S UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS

To many in our day, less utilitarian than those of an earlier era, Borrow must have been an interesting man of letters had he not written his four great books. Single-minded devotion to the less commercially remunerative languages has now become respectable and even estimable. Students of the Scandinavian languages, and of the Celtic, abound in our midst. Borrow was a forerunner with Bowring of much of this 'useless' learning. Borrow came to consider Bowring's apparent neglect of him to be unforgivable. But that time had not arrived, when in 1842 he wrote to him as follows:

To Dr. John Bowring

Oulton, Lowestoft, Suffolk, July 14th, 1842.

George Borrow.

[Pg 403]

FACSIMILE OF A POEM FROM TARGUM

A Translation from the French by George Borrow

[Pg 404]

Now with the achieved success of The Bible in Spain and the leisure of a happy home Borrow could for the moment think of the ambition of 'twelve years ago'—an ambition to put before the public some of the results of his marvellous industry. The labours of the dark, black years between 1825 and 1830 might now perchance see the light. Three such books got themselves published, as we have seen, Romantic Ballads, Targum, and The Talisman. The Sleeping Bard had been translated and offered to 'a little Welsh bookseller' of Smithfield in 1830, who, however, said, when he had read it, 'were I to print it I should be ruined.' That fate followed the book to the end, and Borrow was premature when he said in his Preface to The Sleeping Bard that such folly is on the decline, because he found 'Albemarle Street in '60 willing to publish a harmless but plain-speaking book which Smithfield shrank from in '30.' At the last moment John Murray refused to publish, but seems to have agreed to give his imprint to the title-page. Borrow published the book at his own expense, it being set up by James Matthew Denew, of 72 Hall Plain, Great Yarmouth. Fourteen years later—in 1874—Mr. Murray made some amends by publishing Romano Lavo-Lil, in which are many fine translations from the Romany, and that, during his lifetime, was the 'beginning and the end' of Borrow's essays in publishing so far as his translations were concerned. Webber, the bookseller of Ipswich, did indeed issue The Turkish Jester—advertised as ready for publication in 1857—in 1884, and Jarrold of Norwich The Death of Balder in 1889; but enthusiasts have asked in vain for Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings, Songs of Europe, and Northern Skalds, Kings and Earls. It is not recorded whether Borrow offered these to any publisher other than 'Glorious John' of Albemarle Street, but certain it is that Mr. Murray would have none of them. The 'mountains of manuscript' remained to be the sorrowful interest of Borrow as an old man as they had—many of them—been the sorrow and despair of his early manhood. Here is a memorandum in his daughter's handwriting of the work that Borrow was engaged upon at the time of his death:

And so what many will consider Borrow's 'craze' for verse translations remained with him to the end. We know with what equanimity he bore his defeat in early years. Did he not make humorous 'copy' out of it in Lavengro. It must have been a greater disappointment that his publisher would have none of his wares when he had proved by writing The Bible in Spain that at least some of his work had money in it. For years it was Borrow's opinion that Lockhart stood in his way, wishing to hold the field with his Ancient Spanish Ballads (1821), and maintaining that Borrow was no poet. The view that Borrow had no poetry in him and that his verse is always poor has been held by many of Borrow's admirers. The view will not have the support of those who have had the advantage of reading all Borrow's less known published writings, and the many manuscripts that he left behind him. But on the general question let us hear Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton:[Pg 406]—

Possibly Mr. Watts-Dunton did not contemplate his idea being applied to Borrow's verse translations, but all the same the quality of poetic imagination may be found here in abundance. The little Welsh bookseller of Smithfield said to Borrow in reference to The Sleeping Bard:

And here the little Welsh bookseller paid Borrow a signal compliment. In the main Borrow provided a prose translation of The Sleeping Bard. In Targum however, he showed himself a quite gifted balladist, far removed from the literary standard of Romantic Ballads ten years earlier. Space does not permit of any quotation in this chapter, and I must be content here to declare that the spirit of poetry came over Borrow on many occasions. The whole of Borrow's Songs of Scandinavia will ultimately be published, although for eighty and more years[246] the pile of neatly[Pg 407] written manuscript of that book, which is now in my possession, has appealed for publication in vain. There will be found, in such a ballad as Orm Ungerswayne, for example, a practical demonstration that Borrow had the root of the matter in him. It is true that Borrow's limited acquaintance with English poetry was a serious drawback to great achievement, and his many translations from his favourite Welsh bard Goronwy Owen that are before me are too much under the influence of Pope. In addition to the Songs of Scandinavia I have before me certain other ballads in manuscript—such portions of his various unpublished but frequently advertised works as did not fall to Dr. Knapp.[247] Of these I do not hesitate to say that whatever the difference of opinion as to their poetic quality there can be no difference of opinion as to their being well-told stories of an exceedingly interesting and invigorating character. But I must leave for another time and another opportunity any discussion of Borrow's poetic achievement of which at present the world has had little opportunity of knowing anything.[248] Of prose manuscript there is also a considerable quantity, including diaries of travel and translations of nine or ten stories from various languages. Of the minor books already published we have already spoken of Faustus, Romantic Ballads, Targum, and The Talisman, and Borrow's last and least interesting book Romano Lavo-Lil. There remains but to recall:[Pg 408]—

These eight little volumes will always remain Borrow's least-read books. Only in Targum and The Sleeping Bard do we find much indication of those qualities which made him famous. It is not in the least surprising that the other work failed to find a publisher, and, indeed, from a merely commercial point of view, the late John Murray had more excuse for refusing Romano Lavo-Lil, which he did publish, than The Sleeping Bard, which he refused to publish—at least on his own responsibility. Such books, whatever their merits, are issued to-day only by learned societies. In a quite different category were those many ballads[249] from diverse languages that Borrow had hoped to issue under such titles as Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings, and Northern Skalds, Kings and Earls. These books would have had no difficulty in finding a publisher to-day were they offered by a writer of one half the popularity of Borrow.[250]

[Pg 409]

BORROW AS A PROFESSOR OF LANGUAGES

An 'Advertisement' put forth by Borrow in Norwich during the years of struggle before he was sent to Russia by the Bible Society. This interesting document, which is in Borrow's handwriting, is in the possession of Mr. Frank J. Farrell of Great Yarmouth, by whose courtesy it is reproduced here.

[Pg 410]

There is, I repeat, excellent work in these ballads. As to Targum let it not be forgotten that Hasfeld—really a good judge—said in The Athenæum that 'the work is a pearl of genius,' and that William Bodham Donne declared that 'the language and rhythm are vastly superior to Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.' As to The Sleeping Bard Borrow himself was able to make his own vigorous defence of that work. In emulation of Walter Scott he reviewed himself in The Quarterly.[251] His article is really an essay on Welsh poetry, and incidentally he quotes from his unpublished Celtic Bards, Chiefs and Kings a lengthy passage, the manuscript of which is in my possession. We are introduced again to all Borrow's old friends of Wild Wales: Hew Morris, Goronwy Owen, and finally Elis Wyn. Borrow quotes from The Romany Rye, but as becomes a reviewer of his own book, gives no praise to his achievement.

I find no plays among Borrow's 'mountains of manuscript' in my possession, and so I am not disposed to accept the suggestion that the following letter from Gifford to Borrow refers to a play which Borrow pretended to be the work of a friend while it was really his own. If it was his own he doubtless took Gifford's counsel to heart and promptly destroyed the manuscript:—

To George Borrow, Esq.

A PAGE OF THE MANUSCRIPT OF BORROW'S SONGS OF SCANDINAVIA—AN UNPUBLISHED WORK

Wm. Gifford.

One other phase of this more limited aspect of Borrow's work may be dealt with here—his mastery of languages. I have before me scores of pages which reveal the way that Borrow became a lav-engro—a word-master. He drew up tables of every language in turn, the English word following the German, or Welsh, or whatever the tongue might be, and he learnt these off with amazing celerity. His wonderful memory was his greatest asset in this particular. He was not a philologist if we accept the dictionary definition of that word as 'a person versed in the science of language.' But his interest in languages is refreshing and interesting—never pedantic, and he takes rank among those disinterested lovers of learning who pursue their researches without any regard to the honours or emoluments that they may bring, loving learning for learning's sake, undaunted by the discouragements that come from the indifference of a world to which they have made their appeal in vain.

[Pg 413]

CHAPTER XXXVI

HENRIETTA CLARKE

Borrow never had a child, but happy for him was the part played by his stepdaughter Henrietta in his life. She was twenty-three years old when her mother married him, and it is clear to me that she was from the beginning of their friendship and even to the end of his life devoted to her stepfather. Readers of Wild Wales will recall not only the tribute that Borrow pays to her, which we have already quoted, in which he refers to her 'good qualities and many accomplishments,' but the other pleasant references in that book. 'Henrietta,' he says in one passage, 'played on the guitar[252] and sang a Spanish song, to the great delight of John Jones.' When climbing Snowdon he is keen in his praises of the endurance of 'the gallant girl.' As against all this, there is an undercurrent of depreciation of his stepdaughter among Borrow's biographers. The picture of Borrow's home in later life at Oulton is presented by them with sordid details. The Oulton tradition which still survives among the few inhabitants who lived near the Broad at Borrow's death in 1881, and still reside there, is of an ill-kept home, supremely untidy, and it is as a final indictment of his daughter's[Pg 414] callousness that we have the following gruesome picture by Dr. Knapp:

Dr. Knapp no doubt believed all this;[253] it is endorsed by the village gossip of the past thirty years, and the mythical tragedy is even heightened by a further story of a farm tumbril which carried poor Borrow's body to the railway station when it was being conveyed to London to be buried beside his wife in Brompton Cemetery.

The tumbril story—whether correct or otherwise—is a matter of indifference to me. The legend of the neglect of Borrow in his last moments is however of importance, and the charge can easily be disproved.[254] I have before me Mrs. MacOubrey's diary for 1881.[Pg 415]

I have many such diaries for a long period of years, but this for 1881 is of particular moment. Here, under the date July 26th, we find the brief note, George Borrow died at three o'clock this morning. It is scarcely possible that Borrow's stepdaughter and her husband could have left him alone at three o'clock in the morning in order to drive into Lowestoft, less than two miles distant. At this time, be it remembered, Dr. MacOubrey was eighty-one years of age. Now, as to the general untidiness of Borrow's home at the time of his death—the point is a distasteful one, but it had better be faced. Henrietta was twenty-three years of age when her mother married Borrow. She was sixty-four at the time of his death, and her husband, as I have said, was eighty-one years of age at that time, being three years older than Borrow. Here we have three very elderly people keeping house together and little accustomed overmuch to the assistance of domestic servants. The situation at once becomes clear. Mrs. Borrow had a genius for housekeeping and for management. She watched over her husband, kept his accounts, held the family purse,[255] managed all his affairs. She 'managed' her daughter also, delighting in that daughter's accomplishments of drawing and botany, to which may be added a zeal for the writing of stories which does not seem, judging from the many manuscripts in her handwriting that I have burnt, to have received much editorial encouragement. In short, Henrietta was not domesticated. But just as I have[Pg 416] proved in preceding chapters that Borrow was happy in his married life, so I would urge that as far as a somewhat disappointed career would permit to the sadly bereaved author he was happy in his family circle to the end. It was at his initiative that, when he had returned to Oulton after the death of his wife, his daughter and her husband came to live with him. He declared that to live alone was no longer tolerable, and they gave up their own home in London to join him at Oulton.

A new glimpse of Borrow on his domestic side has been offered to the public even as this book is passing through the press. Mr. S. H. Baldrey, a Norwich solicitor, has given his reminiscences of the author of Lavengro to the leading newspaper of that city.[256] Mr. Baldrey is the stepson of the late John Pilgrim of the firm of Jay and Pilgrim, who were Borrow's solicitors at Norwich in the later years of his life. One at least of Mr. Baldrey's many reminiscences has in it an element of romance; that in which he recalls Mrs. Borrow and her daughter:

Mr. Baldrey is clearly in error here, or shall we say that Mrs. Borrow humorously exaggerated? We have seen that Borrow's annual holiday was a matter of careful arrangement, and his knapsack or satchel is frequently referred to in his descriptions of his various tours. But the matter is of little importance, and Mr. Baldrey's pictures of Borrow are excellent, including that of his personal appearance:

Mr. John Pilgrim lived at Brunswick House, on the Newmarket Road, Norwich, and here Borrow frequently visited him. Mr. Baldrey recalls one particular visit:

[Pg 418]

A LETTER FROM BORROW TO HIS WIFE WRITTEN FROM ROME IN HIS CONTINENTAL JOURNEY OF 1844

And here is a glimpse of Borrow after his wife's death, for which we are grateful to Mr. Baldrey:

[Pg 420]

But this is a lengthy digression from the story of Henrietta Clarke, who married William MacOubrey, an Irishman—and an Orangeman—from Belfast in 1865. The pair lived first in Belfast and afterwards at 80 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Before his marriage he had practised at 134 Sloane Street, London. MacOubrey, although there has been some doubt cast upon the statement, was a Doctor of Medicine of Trinity College, Dublin, and a Barrister-at-Law. Within his limitations he was an accomplished man, and before me lie not only documentary evidence of his M.D. and his legal status, but several printed pamphlets that bear[Pg 421] his name.[258] What is of more importance, the letters from and to his wife that have through my hands and have been consigned to the flames prove that husband and wife lived on most affectionate terms.

It is natural that Borrow's correspondence with his stepdaughter should have been of a somewhat private character, and I therefore publish only a selection from his letters to her, believing however that they modify an existing tradition very considerably:

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.
[Pg 423]

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.
[Pg 424]

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.

George Borrow.

To Mrs. MacOubrey

George Borrow.

To Mrs. MacOubrey

March 6, 1873.

George Borrow.
[Pg 426]

To Mrs. MacOubrey

Norwich, July 12, 1873.

George Borrow.

Here I find a letter from Mrs. MacOubrey to her stepfather:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Southgate House, Bury St. Edmunds, Novbr. 25th, 1873.