a recruiting officer.  The reader of Lavengro may safely be left to make out his own itinerary.  Whilst in Edinburgh Borrow attended the High School, and acquired the Scottish accent.  It is not too much to say that he has managed to make even Edinburgh more romantic simply by abiding there for a season.  From Scotland he went to Ireland, and learnt to ride, as well as to talk the Irish tongue, and to seek etymologies wherever they were or were not to be found.  But for a famous Irish cob, whose hoofs still sound in our ears, Borrow, so he says, might have become a mere philologist.  From Ireland he returned with his parents to Norwich, and resumed studies, which must have been, from a schoolmaster’s point of view, grievously interrupted, under the Rev. Edward Valpy at King Edward’s School.  Here he seems to have been for two or three years.  Dr. Jessopp has told us the story of Borrow’s dyeing his face with walnut juice, and Valpy gravely inquiring of him, ‘Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?’   The Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Archdale Wilson, and the Rev. James Martineau were at school with ‘Lavengro.’  Dr. Jessopp, who in 1859 became headmaster of King Edward’s School, and who has been a Borrovian from the beginning, found the school tradition to be that Borrow, who never reached the sixth form, was indolent and even stupid.  In 1819,—the reader will be glad of a date,—Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich, and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,—a harmless pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention of young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place.  Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace.  ‘By adopting the law,’ says Borrow, ‘I had not ceased to be Lavengro.’  He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone.  He studied German under the direction of the once famous William Taylor of Norwich, who in 1821 wrote to Southey: ‘A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s William Tell, with a view of translating it for the press.  His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity.  Indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.  He would like to get into the office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.’

It only takes five years to make an attorney, and Borrow ought therefore, had he served out his time, to have become a gentleman by Act of Parliament in 1824 or 1825.  He did not do so, though he appears to have remained in Norwich until after 1826.  In that year appeared his Romantic Ballads from the Danish, printed by Simon Wilkins of Norwich by subscription.  Dr. Jessopp opines that the Romantic Ballads must have brought their translator ‘a very respectable sum after paying all the expenses of publication.’  I hope it was so, but, as Dr. Johnson once said about the immortality of the soul, I should like more evidence of it.  When Borrow left Norwich for London, it is hard to say.  It was after the death of his father, and was not likely to have been later than 1828.  His only introduction appears to have been one from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, ‘the publisher’ known to all readers of Lavengro.  Sir Richard was one of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, and in addition to sundry treatises on the duties of juries, was the author of two lucubrations, respectively entitled The Phænomena called by the name of Gravitation proved to be Proximate Effects of the Orbicular and Rotary Motions of the Earth and On the New Theory of the System of the Universe.  In Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica, 1824, Sir Richard is thus contemptuously referred to: ‘This personage is the editor of The Monthly Magazine, in which many of his effusions may be found with the signature of “Common Sense.”’  It is not too much to say that but for Borrow this nefarious man would be utterly forgotten; as it is, he lives for ever in the pages of Lavengro, a hissing and a reproach.  Authors have an ugly trick of getting the better of their publishers in the long run.  After leaving London Borrow began the wanderings described in Lavengro and The Romany Rye.  Those concluded, probably in 1829 or 1830, he crossed the British Channel, and like another Goldsmith, wandered on foot over the Continent of Europe, visiting France, Italy, Austria, and Russia.  Of his adventures in these countries there is unhappily no record.  In St. Petersburg he must have made a long stay, for there he superintended the translation of the Bible into Mandschu-Tartar, and published in 1835 his Targum; or Metrical Translations from Thirty Languages and Dialects.  In 1835 Borrow returned to London, and being already known to the Bible Society for his biblical labours in Russia, was offered, and accepted, the task of circulating the Scriptures in the Spanish Peninsula.  As for his labours in this field, which occupied him so agreeably for four or five years, are they not narrated in The Bible in Spain, a book first published by ‘Glorious John Murray’ in three volumes in 1843?  This is the book which made Borrow famous, though his earlier work, The Zincali; or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain (two vols. 1841), had attracted a good deal of notice.  But The Bible in Spain took readers by storm, and no wonder!  Sir Robert Peel named it in the House of Commons; its perusal imparted a new sensation, the sensation of literature, to many a pious subscriber to the Bible Society.  The book, wherever it went,—and it went where such like books do not often go,—carried joy and rapture with it.  Young people hailed it tumultuously and cherished it tenderly.  There were four editions in three volumes in the year of publication.  What was thought of the book by the Bible Society I do not know.  Perhaps ‘he of the countenance of a lion,’ of whom we read in the forty-fifth chapter of Lavengro, scarcely knew what to say about it; but the precise-looking man with the ill-natured countenance, no doubt, forbade his family to read The Bible in Spain.

In 1840 Borrow married the widow of a naval officer and settled in Norfolk, where his aged mother was still living.  His house was in Oulton Broad; and here he became a notable, the hero of many stories, and the friend of man, provided he was neither literary nor genteel.  Here also he finished Lavengro (1851), and wrote The Romany Rye (1857), Wild Wales (1862), and Romano Lavo-Lil: the Word-Book of the Romany (1874).  For a time Borrow had a house in London in Hereford Square, where his wife died in 1869.  He died himself at Oulton in August 1881, leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the jest-books of Turkey.  Some, at all events, of these works were advertised as ‘ready for the press’ in 1858.

The Bible in Spain was a popular book, and in 1843, the year of its publication, its author, a man of striking appearance, was much fêted and regarded by the lion-hunters of the period.  Borrow did not take kindly to the den.  He was full of inbred suspicions and, perhaps, of unreasonable demands.  He resented the confinement of the dinner-table, the impalement of the ball-room, the imprisonment of the pew.  Like the lion in Browning’s poem, ‘The Glove’—