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

He was a beautiful child; one of those occasionally seen in England, and in England alone; a rosy, angelic face, blue eyes, and light chestnut hair; it was not exactly an Anglo-Saxon countenance, in which, by the by, there is generally a cast of loutishness and stupidity; it partook, to a certain extent, of the Celtic character, particularly in the fire and vivacity which illumined it; his face was the mirror of his mind; perhaps no disposition more amiable was ever found amongst the children of Adam, united, however, with no inconsiderable portion of high and dauntless spirit.  So great was his beauty in infancy, that people, especially those of the poorer classes, would follow the nurse who carried him about in order to look at and bless his lovely face.  At the age of three months an attempt was made to snatch him from his mother’s arms in the streets of London, at the moment she was about to enter a coach; indeed, his appearance seemed to operate so powerfully upon every person who beheld him, that my parents were under continual apprehension of losing him; his beauty, however, was perhaps surpassed by the quickness of his parts.  He mastered his letters in a few hours, and in a day or two could decipher the names of people on the doors of houses and over the shop-windows.

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

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

“My boy, my own boy, you are the very image of myself, the day I took off my coat in the park to fight Big Ben,” said my father, on meeting his son, wet and dripping, immediately after his bold feat.  And who cannot excuse the honest pride of the old man—the stout old man?

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