best picture,” said the painter; “what I want now is a face for Pharaoh; I have long been meditating on a face for Pharaoh.”  Here, chancing to cast his eye upon my countenance, of whom he had scarcely taken any manner of notice, he remained with his mouth open for some time.  “Who is this?” said he at last.  “Oh, this is my brother, I forgot to introduce him—.”

We wish that the acquaintance had extended further, but this was not to be.  Borrow was soon to commence the wanderings which were to give him much unsatisfactory fame, and the pair never met again.  Let us, however, return to John Borrow, who accompanied Haydon to Norwich, leaving his brother for some time longer to the tender mercies of Sir Richard Phillips.  John, we judge, seems to have had plenty of shrewdness, and was not without a sense of his own limitations.  A chance came to him of commercial success in a distant land, and he seized that chance.  A Norwich friend, Allday Kerrison, had gone out to Mexico, and writing from Zacatecas in 1825 asked John to join him.  John accepted.  His salary in the service of the Real del Monte Company was to be £300 per annum.  He sailed for Mexico in 1826, having obtained from his Colonel, Lord Orford, leave of absence for a year, it being understood that renewals of that leave of absence might be granted.  He was entitled to half-pay as a Lieutenant of the West Norfolk Militia, and this he settled upon his mother during his absence.  His career in Mexico was a failure.  There are many of his letters to his mother and brother extant which tell of the difficulties of his situation.  He was in three Mexican companies in succession, and was about to be sent to Columbia to take charge of a mine when he was stricken with a fever, and died at Guanajuato on 22nd November, 1833.  He had far exceeded any leave that his Colonel could in fairness grant, and before his death his name had been taken off the army rolls.

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

I am convinced that your want of success in life is more owing to your being unlike other people than to any other cause.

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

CHAPTER IV
A Wandering Childhood

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

In our opening chapter we referred to the lines in Lavengro, where Borrow recalls his early impressions of his native town, or at least the town in the neighbourhood of the hamlet in which he was born.  Borrow, we may be sure, would have repudiated “Dumpling Green” if he could.  The name had a humorous suggestion.  To this day they call boys from Norfolk “Norfolk Dumplings” in the neighbouring shires.  But East Dereham was something to be proud of.  In it had died the writer who, through the greater part of Borrow’s life, remained the favourite poet of that half of England which professed the Evangelical creed in which Borrow was brought up.  Cowper was buried here by the side of Mary Unwin, and every Sunday little George would see his tomb just as Henry Kingsley was wont to see the tombs in Chelsea Old Church.  The fervour of devotion to Cowper’s memory that obtained in those early days must have been a stimulus to the boy, who from the first had ambitions far beyond anything that he was to achieve.  Here was his first lesson.  The second came from Lady Fenn—a more vivid impression for the child.  Twenty years before Borrow was born Cowper had sung her merits in his verse.  She and her golden-headed cane are commemorated in Lavengro.  Dame Eleanor Fenn had made a reputation in her time.  As “Mrs. Teachwell” and “Mrs. Lovechild” she had published books for the young of a most improving character, The Child’s Grammar, The Mother’s Grammar, A Short History of Insects, and Cobwebs to Catch Flies being of the number.  The forty-fourth edition of The Child’s Grammar by Mrs. Lovechild appeared in 1851, and the twenty-second edition of The Mother’s Grammar in 1849.  But it is her husband that her name most recalls to us.  Sir John Fenn gave us the