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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       Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of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

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WHEREIN MAY BE FOUND MANY HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF BORROW AND HIS FRIENDS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