remember that when I congratulated you upon the success of your two gypsy books I prophesied that now there would be a boom of the gypsies: and I was right it seems.  For you will see by the enclosed newspaper cutting that in Surrey a regular trade is going on in

caravans for gypsy gentlemen.  And “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” are going, I see, into lots of new editions.  I know how this must gratify you.  But I write to ask you whether you have seen the extremely bitter attack upon Borrow’s memory which has appeared in the Daily Chronicle.  The writer is a man I must surely have heard you mention with esteem—Dr. Jessopp.  It is a review of Murray’s new edition of “The Romany Rye.”  In case you have not seen it I send you a cutting from it for you to judge for yourself. [0a]

Was there ever anything so unjust as this?  As to what he says about Borrow’s being without animal passion, I fancy that the writer must have misread certain printed words of yours in which you say, “Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn towards any woman, could she possibly have been a Romany? would she not rather have been of the Scandinavian type?”  But I am quite sure that, when you said this, you did not intend to suggest that he was “the Narses of Literature.”  As to his dislike of children, I have heard you say how interested he used to seem in the presence of gypsy children, and I especially remember one anecdote of yours about the interest he took in a child that he thought was being injured by the mother’s smoking.  And did you not get that lovely anecdote about the gypsy child weeping in the churchyard because the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church chimes from something he told you?  But I can speak from personal experience about his feeling towards children that were not gypsies.  When our family lived at Bury St. Edmunds, in the fifties, my father, as you know, was one of Borrow’s most intimate friends, and he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp’s book shows) and my impression of Borrow is

exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in the least resembled Dr. Jessopp’s description of him.  At that time George was in the nursery and I was a child.  He took a wonderfully kind interest in us all; * * * * * * * * but the one he took most notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very big, massive child.  It was then that he playfully christened him “Hales,” because he said that the child would develop into a second “Norfolk giant.”  You will remember that he always addressed George by that pet name.  But what do you think of Dr. Jessopp’s saying that Borrow’s voice was not that of a man?  You yourself have spoken in some of your writings—I don’t exactly remember where and when—of the “trumpet-like clearness” of Borrow’s voice.  As to his being beardless and therefore the “Narses of Literature” it is difficult to imagine that a man of intelligence, as I suppose Dr. Jessopp is, can really think virility depends upon the growth of a man’s whiskers, as no doubt ignorant people often do.  I should have thought that a man who knew Norfolk well would know that it is notable for its beardless giants of great power.  I really think that, as Borrow’s most intimate friend in his latest years (I mean after my father left Roehampton for Germany), it is your duty to write something and stand up for the dear old boy, and you are the one man now who can defend him and do him justice.  I assure you that the last time that I ever saw him his talk was a good deal about yourself.  I remember the occasion very well; it was just outside the Bank of England, when he was returning from one of those mysterious East-end expeditions that you wot of: he was just partially recovering from that sad accident which you have somewhere alluded to.  As to Dr. Jessopp, it is clear from his remarks upon a friend of Borrow’s—the Rev. Mr. John Gunn, of Norwich, that he never saw Borrow.  Gunn, he says, was of colossal frame and must have been in his youth quite an inch taller than Borrow.  And then he goes on to say that Gunn’s arm was as big as an ordinary man’s thigh.  Now you and I and George, are specially competent to speak of Borrow’s physical development, for we have been with Borrow when at seventy years of age he would bathe in a pond covered with thin ice.  He then stood six feet four and his muscles were as fully developed as those of a young man in training.  If Gunn was a more colossal man than Borrow he certainly ought to

have been put into a show.  But you should read the entire article, and I wish I had preserved it.

Yours ever affectionately,
Thomas St. E. Hake.

I consider this an interesting document to all Borrovians.  There are only two things in it which I have to challenge.  I infer that Mr. Hake shares the common mistake of supposing Borrow to have been an East Anglian.  Not that this is surprising, seeing that Borrow himself shared the same mistake—a mistake upon which I have on a previous occasion remarked.  I have said elsewhere that one might as well call Charlotte Brontë a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian.  He was, of course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman.  He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics, and this explains the Norfolk prejudice against him.  He inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent—unless it were that love of “leg of mutton and turnips” which Mr. Hake and I have so often seen exemplified.  The reason why Borrow was so misjudged in Norfolk was, as I have hinted above, that the racial characteristics of the Celt and the East Anglian clashed too severely.  Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences his imagination throughout his life.  His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier.  Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another.  It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction.  Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother.  Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French.  But such was the egotism of Borrow—perhaps I should have said, such is the egotism of human nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.  East Anglia, however, seems to have cherished a very different feeling towards Borrow.  Another mistake of Mr. Hake’s is in supposing that Borrow

gave me the lovely incident of the gypsy child weeping in the churchyard because “the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church bells.”  As this mistake has been shared by others, and has appeared in print, I may as well say that it was a real incident in the life of a well-known Romany chi, from whom I have this very morning received a charming letter dated from “the van in the field,” where she has settled for the winter.

The anecdote about Borrow and the gypsy child who was, or seemed to be, suffering through the mother’s