During his sojournment in London this animal had been killed; and on the very day of his return to his father's house, he partook of part of his favourite at dinner, without his being made acquainted with the circumstance of its having been slaughtered during his absence. On learning this, however, he experienced a sudden indisposition; and declared that so great an effect had the idea of his having eaten part of his slaughtered favourite upon him, that he would never again taste animal food; a vow to which he has hitherto firmly adhered.[50]

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, 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 naively informed in the Memoir, by the young woman's talent in the preparation of a vegetable pie. This is 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 Athenaeum. Hereupon he and Phillips quarrelled again, because Dr. Aikin described himself in advertisements of The Athenaeum 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 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,

had come back to Dublin from London, where he had been 'the guest of princes, the friend of peers, the translator of Anacreon!' From royal palaces and noble manors, he had returned to his family seat—a grocer's shop at the corner of Little Longford Street, Angier Street.

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 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 L300 for the copyright of The Wild Irish Girl. Phillips had offered only L200 down and L50 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 L300. A few months later he gave her a hundred 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, 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 shrievalty was one Smith, who afterwards became Lord Mayor:

The personnel of the two sheriffs presented a sharp contrast. Smith loved aldermanic cheer, but was pale and cadaverous in complexion; whilst Phillips, who never ate animal food, was rosy and healthful in appearance. One day, when the sheriffs were in full state, the procession was stopped by an obstruction in the street traffic; when droll were the mistakes of the mob: to Smith they cried, 'Here's Old Water-gruel!' to Phillips, 'Here's Roast Beef! something like an Englishman!'

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, 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:

'Well, sir, what is your pleasure?' said the big man, in a rough tone, as I stood there, looking at him wistfully—as well I might—for upon that man, at the time of which I am speaking, my principal, I may say my only hopes, rested.

'Sir,' said I, 'my name is So-and-so, and I am the bearer of a letter to you from Mr. So-and-so, an old friend and correspondent of yours.'

The countenance of the big man instantly lost the suspicious and lowering expression which it had hitherto exhibited; he strode forward and, seizing me by the hand, gave me a violent squeeze.

'My dear sir,' said he, 'I am rejoiced to see you in London. I have been long anxious for the pleasure—we are old friends, though we have never before met. Taggart,' said he to the man who sat at the desk, 'this is our excellent correspondent, the friend and pupil of our excellent correspondent.'



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

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 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:

In the compilation of my Lives and Trials I was exposed to incredible mortification, and ceaseless trouble, from this same rage for interference.... This was not all; when about a moiety of the first volume had been printed, he materially altered the plan of the work; it was no longer to be a collection of mere Newgate lives and trials, but of lives and trials of criminals in general, foreign as well as domestic.... 'Where is Brandt and Struensee?' cried the publisher. 'I am sure I don't know,' I replied; whereupon the publisher falls to squealing like one of Joey's rats. 'Find me up Brandt and Struensee by next morning, or—' 'Have you found Brandt and Struensee?' cried the publisher, on my appearing before him next morning. 'No,' I reply, 'I can hear nothing about them'; whereupon the publisher falls to bellowing like Joey's bull. By dint of incredible diligence, I at length discover the dingy volume containing the lives and trials of the celebrated two who had brooded treason dangerous to the state of Denmark. I purchase the dingy volume, and bring it in triumph to the publisher, the perspiration running down my brow. The publisher takes the dingy volume in his hand, he examines it attentively, then puts it down; his countenance is calm for a moment, almost benign. Another moment and there is a gleam in the publisher's sinister eye; he snatches up the paper containing the names of the worthies which I have intended shall figure in the forthcoming volumes—he glances rapidly over it, and his countenance once more assumes a terrific expression. 'How is this?' he exclaims; 'I can scarcely believe my eyes—the most important life and trial omitted to be found in the whole criminal record—what gross, what utter negligence! Where's the life of Farmer Patch? where's the trial of Yeoman Patch?'

'What a life! what a dog's life!' I would frequently exclaim, after escaping from the presence of the publisher.[59]

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,' 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[49] The few lines awarded to him in Mumby's Romance of Bookselling are an illustration of this.

[50] Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Sir Richard Phillips, King's High Sheriff for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, by a Citizen of London and Assistants. London, 1808. This Memoir was published in 1808, many years before the death of Phillips, and was clearly inspired and partly written by him, although an autograph letter before me from one Ralph Fell shows that the worthy Fell actually received L12 from Phillips for 'compiling' the book. A portion of the Memoir may have been written by another literary hack named Pinkerton, but all of it was compiled under the direction of Phillips.

[51] Mr. Arthur Aikin Brodribb in his memoir of Aikin in the Dictionary of National Biography makes the interesting but astonishing statement that Aikin's Life of Howard 'has been adopted, without acknowledgment, by a modern writer.' Mr. Brodribb apparently knew nothing of Dr. Aikin's association with the Monthly Magazine or with the first Athenaeum.

[52] I have no less than four memoirs of Lady Morgan on my shelves:—Passages from my Autobiography, by Sydney, Lady Morgan (Richard Bentley, 1859); The Friends, Foes, and Adventures of Lady Morgan, by William John Fitzpatrick (W. B. Kelly: Dublin, 1859); Lady Morgan; Her Career, Literary and Personal, with a Glimpse of her Friends, and A Word to her Calumniators, by William John Fitzpatrick (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1860); Lady Morgan's Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries and Correspondence. Two vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1863).

[53] Memoirs of Lady Morgan, edited by W. Hepworth Dixon.

[54] See Timbs's article on Phillips in his Walks and Talks about London, 1865. Timbs was wont to recall, as the late W. L. Thomas of the Graphic informed me, that while at the Illustrated London News he got so exasperated with Herbert Ingram, the founder and proprietor, that he would frequently write and post a letter of resignation, but would take care to reach the office before Ingram in the morning in order to withdraw it.

[55] Another London book before me, which bears the imprint 'Richard Phillips, Bridge Street,' is entitled The Picture of London for 1811. Mine is the twelfth edition of this remarkable little volume.

[56] In Lavengro.

[57] Legh Richmond (1772-1827), the author of The Dairyman's Daughter and The Young Cottager, which had an extraordinary vogue in their day. A few years earlier than this Princess Sophia Metstchersky translated the former into the Russian language, and Borrow must have seen copies when he visited St. Petersburg. Richmond was the first clerical secretary of the Religious Tract Society, with which The Dairyman's Daughter has always been one of the most popular of tracts.

[58] Phillips at his death in 1840 left a widow, three sons, and four daughters. One son was Vicar of Kilburn.

[59] Lavengro, ch. xxxix.

[60] Ueber die naechsten Ursachen der materiellen Erscheinungen des Universums, von Sir Richard Phillips, nach dem Englischen bearbeitet von General von Theobald und Prof. Dr. Lebret. Stuttgart, 1826.



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:

I had still an idea that, provided I could persuade any spirited publisher to give these translations to the world, I should acquire both considerable fame and profit; not, perhaps, a world-embracing fame such as Byron's; but a fame not to be sneered at, which would last me a considerable time, and would keep my heart from breaking;—profit, not equal to that which Scott had made by his wondrous novels, but which would prevent me from starving, and enable me to achieve some other literary enterprise. I read and re-read my ballads, and the more I read them the more I was convinced that the public, in the event of their being published, would freely purchase, and hail them with the merited applause.

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 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:

They found the people of the place modelled after so unsightly a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features, that the devil owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of an English town called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday's best.[61]

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 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 Hoellenfahrt, 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 mentions Klinger's name in his latter volume, of which the title-page runs:

Faustus: His Life, Death, and Descent into Hell. Translated from the German. London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825.

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:

As your bill will become payable in a few days, I am willing to take thirty copies of Faustus instead of the money. The book has been burnt in both the libraries here, and, as it has been talked about, I may perhaps be able to dispose of some in the course of a year or so.

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 circumstance. It is thus that the Literary Gazette for 16th July 1825 refers to Borrow's little book:

This is another work to which no respectable publisher ought to have allowed his name to be put. The political allusions and metaphysics, which may have made it popular among a low class in Germany, do not sufficiently season its lewd scenes and coarse descriptions for British palates. We have occasionally publications for the fireside—these are only fit for the fire.

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:

(1) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces by George Borrow. Norwich: Printed and Published by S. Wilkin, Upper Haymarket, 1826.

(2) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces by George Borrow. London: Published by John Taylor, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, 1826.

(3) Romantic Ballads, Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces, by George Borrow. London: Published by Wightman and Cramp, 24 Paternoster Row, 1826.[63]

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 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.

MY DEAR SIR,—I am very much obliged to you for the opportunity that you have afforded me of perusing your spirited and faithful translating of the Danish ballads. Mr. Allan Cunningham, who, as you will know, is an ancient minstrel himself, says that they are more true to the originals and more truly poetical than any that he has yet seen. I have delivered one copy to Mr. Lockhart, the new editor of the Quarterly Review, and I hope he will notice it as it deserves. Murray would probably be inclined to publish your translations.—I remain, dear sir, your obedient and faithful servant,

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 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' 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:

GEORGE BORROW

'Now, Agnes, Agnes list to me, Thy babes are longing so after thee.' 'I cannot come yet, here must I stay Until the priest shall have said his say,' And when the priest had said his say, She thought with her mother at home she'd stay. 'O Agnes, Agnes list to me, Thy babes are sorrowing after thee,' 'Let them sorrow and sorrow their fill, But back to them never return I will.'

MATTHEW ARNOLD

We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with rains, And we gazed up the aisles through the small leaded panes. She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear: 'Margaret, hist! come quick we are here! Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long-alone; The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan,' But, ah, she gave me never a look, For her eyes were sealed on the holy book! Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door. Come away, children, call no more! Come away, come down, call no more!

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 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] Life and Death of Faustus, p. 59.

[62] Faustus: His Life, Death, and Doom: a Romance in Prose, translated from the German. London: W. Kent and Co., Paternoster Row, 1864, Borrow's Life and Death of Faustus was reprinted in 1840, again with Simpkin's imprint. Collating Borrow's translation with the issue of 1864, I find that, with a few trivial verbal alterations, they are identical—that is to say, the translator of the book of 1864 did not translate at all, but copied from Borrow's version of Faustus, copying even his errors in translation. There is no reason to suppose that the individual, whoever he may have been, who prepared the 1864 edition of Faustus for the Press, had ever seen either the German original or the French translation of Klinger's book. It is clear that he 'conveyed' Borrow's translation almost in its entirety.

[63] Allan Cunningham, in a letter to Borrow, says, 'Taylor will undertake to publish.' But there must have been a change afterwards, for some of the London copies bear the imprint Wightman and Cramp. In 1913 Jarrold and Sons of Norwich issued a reprint of Romantic Ballads limited to 300 copies, with facsimiles of the manuscript from my Borrow Papers.

[64] Knapp's Life, vol. i 117.



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 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 Andre, 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 L50 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. 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 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, 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:

'In what can I oblige you, sir?' said the magistrate.

'Well, sir; the soul of wit is brevity; we want a place for an approaching combat between my friend here and a brave from town. Passing by your broad acres this fine morning we saw a pightle, which we deemed would suit. Lend us that pightle, and receive our thanks; 'twould be a favour, though not much to grant: we neither ask for Stonehenge nor for Tempe.'

My friend looked somewhat perplexed; after a moment, however, he said, with a firm but gentlemanly air, 'Sir, I am sorry that I cannot comply with your request.'

'Not comply!' said the man, his brow becoming dark as midnight; and with a hoarse and savage tone, 'Not comply! why not?'

'It is impossible, sir—utterly impossible!'

'Why so?'

'I am not compelled to give my reasons to you, sir, nor to any man.'

'Let me beg of you to alter your decision,' said the man, in a tone of profound respect.

'Utterly impossible, sir; I am a magistrate.'

'Magistrate! then fare-ye-well, for a green-coated buffer and a Harmanbeck.'

'Sir,' said the magistrate, springing up with a face fiery with wrath.

But, with a surly nod to me, the man left the apartment; and in a moment more the heavy footsteps of himself and his companion were heard descending the staircase.

'Who is that man?' said my friend, turning towards me.

'A sporting gentleman, well known in the place from which I come.'

'He appeared to know you.'

'I have occasionally put on the gloves with him.'

'What is his name?'

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:

'Look up there, brother!'

I looked up. Connected with this tempest there was one feature to which I have already alluded—the wonderful colours of the clouds. Some were of vivid green, others of the brightest orange, others as black as pitch. The gypsy's finger was pointed to a particular part of the sky.

'What do you see there, brother?'

'A strange kind of cloud.'

'What does it look like, brother?'

'Something like a stream of blood.'

'That cloud foreshoweth a bloody dukkeripen.'

'A bloody fortune!' said I. 'And whom may it betide?'

'Who knows?' said the gypsy.

Down the way, dashing and splashing, and scattering man, horse, and cart to the left and right, came an open barouche, drawn by four smoking steeds, with postillions in scarlet jackets and leather skull-caps. Two forms were conspicuous in it—that of the successful bruiser, and of his friend and backer, the sporting gentleman of my acquaintance.

'His!' said the gypsy, pointing to the latter, whose stern features wore a smile of triumph, as, probably recognising me in the crowd, he nodded in the direction of where I stood, as the barouche hurried by.

There went the barouche, dashing through the rain-gushes, and in it one whose boast it was that he was equal to 'either fortune.' Many have heard of that man—many may be desirous of knowing yet more of him. I have nothing to do with that man's after life—he fulfilled his dukkeripen. 'A bad, violent man!' Softly, friend; when thou wouldst speak harshly of the dead, remember that thou hast not yet fulfilled thy own dukkeripen!

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

When a boy of fourteen I was present at a prize-fight; why should I hide the truth? It took place on a green meadow, beside a running stream, close by the old church of E——, and within a league of the ancient town of N——, the capital of one of the eastern counties. The terrible Thurtell was present, lord of the concourse; for wherever he moved he was master, and whenever he spoke, even when in chains, every other voice was silent. He stood on the mead, grim and pale as usual, with his bruisers around. He it was, indeed, who got up the fight, as he had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes, and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.

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:

They cut his throat from ear to ear, His brain they battered in, His name was Mr. William Weare, He dwelt in Lyon's Inn.

Carlyle's division of human beings of the upper classes into 'noblemen, gentlemen, and gigmen,' which occurs 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 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, 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.

Thurtell meanwhile had divided the spoil—some L20, 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]

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 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,

fixed his eyes on a young gentleman in the crowd, whom he had frequently seen as a spectator at the commencement of the proceedings against him. Seeing that the individual was affected by the circumstances, he removed them to another quarter, and in so doing recognised an individual well known in the sporting circles, to whom he made a slight bow.

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 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:

The night before the day he was hanged at H——, I harnessed a Suffolk Punch to my light gig, the same Punch which I had offered to him, which I have ever since kept, and which brought me and this short young man to Horncastle, and in eleven hours I drove that Punch one hundred and ten miles. I arrived at H—— just in the nick of time. There was the ugly jail—the scaffold—and there upon it stood the only friend I ever had in the world. Driving my Punch, which was all in a foam, into the midst of the crowd, which made way for me as if it knew what I came for, I stood up in my gig, took off my hat, and shouted, 'God Almighty bless you, Jack!' The dying man turned his pale grim face towards me—for his face was always somewhat grim, do you see—nodded and said, or I thought I heard him say, 'All right, old chap.' The next moment—my eyes water. He had a high heart, got into a scrape whilst in the marines, lost his half-pay, took to the turf, ring, gambling, and at last cut the throat of a villain who had robbed him of nearly all he had. But he had good qualities, and I know for certain that he never did half the bad things laid to his charge.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the Year 1825. In six volumes. London: Printed for Geo. Knight & Lacey, Paternoster Row, 1825. Price L3, 12s. in boards.

[66] The New and Complete Newgate Calendar or Malefactors Recording Register. By William Jackson. Six vols. 1802.

[67] Cobbett and Howell's State Trials. In thirty-three volumes and index, 1809 to 1828. The last volume, apart from the index, was actually published the year after Borrow's Celebrated Trials, that is, in 1826; but the last trial recorded was that of Thistlewood in 1820. The editors were William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and his son, Thomas Jones Howell.

[68] The following note appeared in The Monthly Magazine for 1st July 1824 (vol. lvii. p. 557):

'A Selection of the most remarkable Trials and Criminal Causes is printing in five volumes. It will include all famous cases, from that of Lord Cobham, in the reign of Henry the Fifth, to that of John Thurtell; and those connected with foreign as well as English jurisprudence. Mr. Borrow, the editor, has availed himself of all the resources of the English, German, French, and Italian languages; and his work, including from 150 to 200 of the most interesting cases on record, will appear in October next. The editor of the preceding has ready for the press a Life of Faustus, his Death, and Descent into Hell, which will also appear early in the next winter.'

[69] Did the poet, who had an interest in criminology, know of his father's quite innocent association with the Fauntleroy trial?

[70] Another witness attained fame by her answer to the inquiry, 'Was supper postponed?' with the reply, 'No, it was pork.'

[71] I have already stated (ch. x. p. 111) that three members of the Thurtell family subscribed for Romantic Ballads. I should have hesitated to include John Thurtell among the subscribers, as he was hanged two years before the book was published, had I not the high authority of Mr. Walter Rye, but recently Mayor of Norwich, and the honoured author of a History of Norfolk Families and other works. Mr. Rye, to whom I owe much of the information concerning the Thurtells published here, tells me that there was only this one, 'J. Thurtell.' Borrow had doubtless been appealing for subscribers for a very long time. I cannot, however, accept Mr. Rye's suggestion to me that Borrow left Norwich because he was mixed up with Thurtell in ultra-Whig or Radical scrapes, the intimidation and 'cooping' of Tory voters being a characteristic of the elections of that day with the wilder spirits, of whom Thurtell was doubtless one. Borrow's sympathies were with the Tory party from his childhood up—following his father.

[72] The Fatal Effects of Gambling Exemplified in the Murder of Wm. Weare and the Trial and Fate of John Thurtell, the Murderer, and his Accomplices. London: Thomas Kelly, Paternoster Row. 1824. I have a very considerable number of Weare pamphlets in my possession, one of them being a record of the trial by Pierce Egan, the author of Life in London and Boxiana. Walter Scott writes in his diary of being absorbed in an account of the trial, while he deprecates John Bull's maudlin sentiment over 'the pitiless assassin.' That was in 1826, but in 1828 Scott went out of his way when travelling from London to Edinburgh, to visit Gill's Hill, and describes the scene of the tragedy very vividly. Lockhart's Life, ch. lxxvi.

[73] Elstree had already had its association with a murder case, for Martha Reay, the mistress of John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, was buried in the church in 1779. She was the mother of several of the Earl's children, one of whom was Basil Montagu. She was a beautiful woman and a delightful singer, and was appearing on the stage at Covent Garden, which theatre she was leaving on the night of 7th April 1779, when the Reverend James Hackman, Vicar of Wiveton in Norfolk, shot her through the head with a pistol in a fit of jealous rage. Hackman was hanged at Tyburn, Boswell attending the funeral. Croft's supposed letters between Hackman and Martha Reay, which made a great sensation when issued under the title of Love and Madness, are now known to be spurious (see ch. x. p. 115). Martha Reay was buried in the chancel of Elstree Church, but Lord Sandwich, who, although he sent word to Hackman, who asked his forgiveness, that 'he had robbed him of all comfort in this world,' took no pains to erect a monument over her remains. On 28th February 1913 the present writer visited Elstree in the interest of this book. He found that the church of Martha Reay and William Weare had long disappeared. A new structure dating from 1853 had taken its place. The present vicar, he was told, has located the spot where Weare was buried, and it coincides with the old engravings. Martha Reay's remains, at the time of the rebuilding, were removed to the churchyard, and lie near the door of the vestry, lacking all memorial. The Artichoke Inn has also been rebuilt, and 'Weare's Pond,' which alone recalls the tragedy to-day, where the body was found, has contracted into a small pool. It is, however, clearly authentic, the brook, as pictured in the old trial-books, now running under the road.

[74] One of them was Mr. Justice Best, of whom it is recorded that a certain index had the reference line, 'Mr. Justice Best: his Great Mind,' which seemed to have no justification in the mental qualities of that worthy, but was explained when one referred to the context and saw that 'Mr. Justice Best said that he had a great mind to commit the witness for contempt.'

[75] See an introduction by Thomas Seccombe to Lavengro in 'Everyman's Library.'



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:

Reader, have you ever seen a fight? If not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it is a fight like that between the Gas-man and Bill Neate.

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:

No small portion of the public has taken it for granted that pugilism and blackguardism are synonymous. It is as an antidote to these slanderers that we pen a candid history of the boxers; and taking the general habits of men of humble origin (elevated by their courage and bodily gifts to be the associates of those more fortunate in worldly position), we fearlessly maintain that the best of our boxers present as good samples of honesty, generosity of spirit, goodness of heart and humanity, as an equal number of men of any class of society.

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 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 Caesars 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 paean of praise for the bruisers of England:

Let no one sneer at the bruisers of England—what were the gladiators of Rome, or the bull-fighters of Spain, in its palmiest days, compared to England's bruisers?[77]



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 L20,000 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:

Honour to Brain, who four months after the event which I have now narrated was champion of England, having conquered the heroic Johnson. Honour to Brain, who, at the end of other four months, worn out by the dreadful blows which he had received in his manly combats, expired in the arms of my father, who read the Bible to him in his latter moments—Big Ben Brain.

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 good reading in any case, as does Borrow's eulogy of some of his own contemporaries of the prize-ring:

So the bruisers of England are come to be present at the grand fight speedily coming off; there they are met in the precincts of the old town, near the field of the chapel, planted with tender saplings at the restoration of sporting Charles, which are now become venerable elms as high as many a steeple. There they are met at a fitting rendezvous, where a retired coachman, with one leg, keeps an hotel and a bowling-green. I think I now see them upon the bowling-green, the men of renown, amidst hundreds of people with no renown at all, who gaze upon them with timid wonder. Fame, after all, is a glorious thing, though it lasts only for a day. There's Cribb, the champion of England, and perhaps the best man in England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure, and face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher, the younger, not the mighty one, who is gone to his place, but the Teucer Belcher, the most scientific pugilist that ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to be, I won't say what. He appears to walk before me now, as he did that evening, with his white hat, white greatcoat, thin genteel figure, springy step, and keen, determined eye. Crosses him, what a contrast! grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word for nobody, and a hard blow for anybody—hard! one blow, given with the proper play of his athletic arm, will unsense a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, under-sized, and who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the light weights, so called—Randall! the terrible Randall, who has Irish blood in his veins—not the better for that, nor the worse; and not far from him is his last antagonist, Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was a near thing; and 'a better shentleman,' in which he is quite right, for he is a Welshman. But how shall I name them all? They were there by dozens, and all tremendous in their way. There was Bulldog Hudson, and fearless Scroggins, who beat the conqueror of Sam the Jew. There was Black Richmond—no, he was not there, but I knew him well; he was the most dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was Purcell, who could never conquer till all seemed over with him. There was—what! shall I name thee last? ay, why not? I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family still above the sod, where mayest thou long continue—true piece of English stuff, Tom of Bedford—sharp as winter, kind as spring.

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 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[76] The New Monthly Magazine, February 1822, 'The Fight.' Reprinted among William Hazlitt's Fugitive Writings in vol. xii. of his Collected Works (Dent, 1904).

[77] Lavengro ch. xxvi. 'It is as good as Homer,' says Mr. Augustine Birrell, quoting the whole passage in his Res Judicatae. Mr. Birrell tells a delightful story of an old Quaker lady who was heard to say at a dinner-table, when the subject of momentary conversation was a late prize-fight: 'Oh, pity it was that ever corruption should have crept in amongst them'—she had just been reading Lavengro.

[78] Pugilistica, vol. i. 69.

[79] Lavengro, ch. i.



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 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 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 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, 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]

FOOTNOTES:

[80] Only thus can we explain Borrow's later declaration that he had four times been in prison.

[81] I quote this letter in another chapter. Mr. Herbert Jenkins thinks (Life, ch. v. p. 88) that Borrow was in Paris during the revolution of 1830, because of a picturesque reference to the war correspondents there in The Bible in Spain. But Borrow never hesitated to weave little touches of romance from extraneous writers into his narratives, and may have done so here. I have visited most of the principal capitals of the world, he says in The Bible in Spain. This we would call a palpable lie were not so much of The Bible in Spain sheer invention.

[82] Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police until 1827, and now proprietor of the paper manufactory at St. Mande. Written by himself. Translated from the French. In Four Volumes. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot, Ave Maria Lane, 1829.

[83] This with other documents I am about to present to the Borrow Museum, Norwich.

[84] In 1830 Borrow had another disappointment. He translated The Sleeping Bard from the Welsh. This also failed to find a publisher. It was issued in 1860, under which date we discuss it.



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 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.