With so much liberty Borrow desired more. He played truant and, as we have seen, was thrashed for it. He was soon to leave school for good, though there is nothing to prove that he left on account of this escapade, or that the thrashing produced the “symptoms of a rapid decline,” with a failure of strength and appetite, which he speaks of in the eighteenth chapter of “Lavengro,” after the Gypsies had gone away. He was almost given over by the physicians, he tells us, but cured by an “ancient female, a kind of doctress,” with a decoction of “a bitter root which grows on commons and desolate places.” An attack of “the dark feeling of mysterious dread” came with convalescence.

But “never during any portion of my life did time flow on more speedily,” he says, than during the next two or three years. After some hesitation between Church and Law, he was articled in 1819 to Messrs. Simpson and Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, St. Giles’, Norwich, and he lived with Simpson in the Upper Close. As a friend said, the law was an excellent profession for those who never intend to follow it. As Borrow himself said, “I have ever loved to be as explicit as possible; on which account, perhaps, I never attained to any proficiency in the law.” Borrow sat faithfully at his desk and learned a good deal of Welsh, Danish, Hebrew, Arabic, Gaelic, and Armenian, making translations from these languages in prose and verse. In “Wild Wales” he recalls translating Danish poems “over the desk of his ancient master, the gentleman solicitor of East Anglia,” and learning Welsh by reading a Welsh “Paradise Lost” side by side with the original, and by having lessons on Sunday afternoons at his father’s house from a groom named Lloyd.

His chief master was William Taylor, the “Anglo-Germanist” of “Lavengro.” Taylor was born in 1765. He studied in Germany as a youth and returned to England with a great enthusiasm for German literature. He translated Goethe’s “Iphigenia” (1793), Lessing’s “Nathan” (1791), Wieland’s “Dialogues of the Gods,” etc. (1795); he published “Tales of Yore,” translated from several languages, and a “Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke,” in 1810, “English Synonyms discriminated” in 1813, and an “Historical Survey of German Poetry,” interspersed with various translations, in 1823-30. He was bred among Unitarians, read Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, disliked the Church, and welcomed the French Revolution, though he was no friend to “the cause of national ambition and aggrandisement.” He belonged to a Revolution Society at Norwich, and in 1790 wrote from Paris calling the National Assembly “that well-head of philosophical legislation, whose pure streams are now overflowing the fairest country upon earth and will soon be sluiced off into the other realms of Europe, fertilising all with the living energy of its waters.” In 1791 he and his father withdrew their capital from manufacture and William Taylor devoted himself to literature. Hazlitt speaks of the “style of philosophical criticism which has been the boast of the ‘Edinburgh Review,’” as first introduced into the “Monthly Review” by Taylor in 1796. Scott said that Taylor’s translation of Burger’s “Lenore” made him a poet. Sir James Mackintosh learned the Taylorian language for the sake of the man’s “vigour and originality”—“As the Hebrew is studied for one book, so is the Taylorian by me for one author.”

William Taylor, of Norwich

I will give a few hints at the nature of his speculation. In one of his letters he speaks of stumbling on “the new hypothesis that the Nebuchadnezzar of Scripture is the Cyrus of Greek History,” and second, that “David, the Jew, a favourite of this prince, wrote all those oracles scattered in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel relative to his enterprises, for the particularisation of which they afford ample materials.” Writing of his analysis, in the “Critical Review,” of Paulus’ Commentary on the New Testament, he blames the editor for a suppression—“an attempt to prove, from the first and second chapter of Luke, that Zacharias, who wrote these chapters, meant to hold himself out as the father of Jesus Christ as well as of John the Baptist. The Jewish idea of being conceived of the Holy Ghost did not exclude the idea of human parentage. The rabbinical commentator on Genesis explains this.” He was called “Godless Billy Taylor,” but says he: “When I publish my other pamphlet in proof of the great truth that Jesus Christ wrote the ‘Wisdom’ and translated the ‘Ecclesiasticus’ from the Hebrew of his grandfather Hillel, you will be convinced (that I am convinced) that I and I alone am a precise and classical Christian; the only man alive who thinks concerning the person and doctrines of Christ what he himself thought and taught.” His “Letter concerning the two first chapters of Luke” has the further title, “Who was the father of Christ?” He calls “not absolutely indefensible” the opinion of the anonymous German author of the “Natural History of Jesus of Nazareth,” that Joseph of ArimathÆa was the father of Jesus Christ. He mentions that “a more recent anonymous theorist, with greater plausibility, imagines that the acolytes employed in the Temple of Jerusalem were called by the names of angels, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, accordingly as they were stationed behind, beside, or before, the mercy-seat; and that the Gabriel of the Temple found means to impose on the innocence of the virgin.” “This,” he says, “is in many ways compatible with Mary’s having faithfully given the testimony put together by Luke.” He gives at great length the arguments in favour of Zacharias as the father, and tells Josephus’ story of Mundus and Paulina. {68}

Norwich was then “a little Academe among provincial cities,” as Mr. Seccombe calls it; he continues:

“Among the high lights of the illuminated capital of East Anglia were the Cromes, the Opies, John Sell Cotman, Elizabeth Fry, Dr. William Enfield (of Speaker fame), and Dr. Rigby, the father of Lady Eastlake; but pre-eminent above all reigned the twin cliques of Taylors and Martineaus, who amalgamated at impressive intervals for purposes of mutual elevation and refinement.

“The salon of Susannah Taylor, the mother of Sarah Austin, the wife of John Taylor, hymn writer and deacon of the seminal chapel, the once noted Octagon, in Norwich, included in its zenith Sir James Mackintosh, Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson, the solemn Dr. John Alderson, Amelia Opie, Henry Reeve of Edinburgh fame, Basil Montagu, the Sewards, the Quaker Gurneys of Earlham, and Dr. Frank Sayers, whom the German critics compared to Gray, who had handled the Norse mythology in poetry, to which Borrow was introduced by Sayer’s private biographer, the eminent and aforesaid William Taylor” [no relation of the “Taylors of Norwich”] “whose ‘Jail-delivery of German Studies’ the jealous Thomas Carlyle stigmatized in 1830 as the work of a natural-born English Philistine.”

Nevertheless, in spite of the Taylors and the Martineaus, says William Taylor’s biographer, Robberds: “The love of society almost necessarily produces the habit of indulging in the pleasures of the table; and, though he cannot be charged with having carried this to an immoderate excess, still the daily repetition of it had taxed too much the powers of nature and exhausted them before the usual period.” Taylor died in 1836 and was remembered best for his drinking and for his bloated appearance. Harriet Martineau wrote of him in her autobiography:

“William Taylor was managed by a regular process, first of feeding, then of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking to make him talk: and then came his sayings, devoured by the gentlemen and making ladies and children aghast;—defences of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it: information given as certain that ‘God Save the King’ was sung by Jeremiah in the Temple of Solomon,—that Christ was watched on the day of His supposed ascension, and observed to hide Himself till dark, and then to make His way down the other side of the mountain; and other such plagiarisms from the German Rationalists. When William Taylor began with ‘I firmly believe,’ we knew that something particularly incredible was coming. . . . His virtues as a son were before our eyes when we witnessed his endurance of his father’s brutality of temper and manners, and his watchfulness in ministering to the old man’s comfort in his infirmities. When we saw, on a Sunday morning, William Taylor guiding his blind mother to chapel, and getting her there with her shoes as clean as if she had crossed no gutters in those flint-paved streets, we could forgive anything that had shocked or disgusted us at the dinner table. But matters grew worse in his old age, when his habits of intemperance kept him out of the sight of the ladies, and he got round him a set of ignorant and conceited young men, who thought they could set the world right by their destructive tendencies. One of his chief favourites was George Borrow. . . .”

Another of “the harum-scarum young men” taken up by Taylor and introduced “into the best society the place afforded,” writes Harriet Martineau, was Polidori.

Borrow was introduced to Taylor in 1820 by “Mousha,” the Jew who taught him Hebrew. Taylor “took a great interest” in him and taught him German. “What I tell Borrow once,” he said, “he ever remembers.” In 1821 Taylor wrote to Southey, who was an early friend:

“A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ with the 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.”

Borrow was at that time a “reserved and solitary” youth, tall, spare, dark complexioned and usually dressed in black, who used to be seen hanging about the Close and talking through the railings of his garden to some of the Grammar School boys. He was a noticeable youth, and he told his father that a lady had painted him and compared his face to that of Alfieri’s Saul.

Tuck’s Court, Norwich. Photo: Jarrold & Sons, Norwich

Borrow pleased neither his master nor his father by his knowledge of languages, though it was largely acquired in the lawyer’s office. “The lad is too independent by half,” Borrow makes his father say, after painting a filial portrait of the old man, “with locks of silver gray which set off so nobly his fine bold but benevolent face, his faithful consort at his side, and his trusty dog at his feet.” Nor did the youth please himself. He was languid again, tired even of the Welsh poet, Ab Gwilym. He was anxious about his father, who was low spirited over his elder son’s absence in London as a painter, and over his younger son’s misconduct and the “strange notions and doctrines”—especially the doctrine that everyone has a right to dispose as he thinks best of that which is his own, even of his life—which he had imbibed from Taylor. Taylor was “fond of getting hold of young men and, according to orthodox accounts, doing them a deal of harm.” {71a} His views, says Dr. Knapp, sank deep “into the organism of his pupil,” and “would only be eradicated, if at all, through much suffering.” Dr. Knapp thought that the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a “favourable change in his mode of thinking”—as if prize fighting and murder were not far more common among Christians than atheists. But if Borrow had never met Taylor he would have met someone else, atheist or religious enthusiast, who would have lured him from the straight, smooth, flowery path of orthodoxy; otherwise he might have been a clergyman or he might have been Dr. Knapp, but he would not have been George Borrow. “What is truth?” he asked. “Would that I had never been born!” he said to himself. And it was an open air ranter, not a clergyman or unobtrusive godly man, that made him exclaim: “Would that my life had been like his—even like that man’s.” Then the Gypsy reminded him of “the wind on the heath” and the boxing gloves.

When his father asked Borrow what he proposed to do, {71b} seeing that he was likely to do nothing at law, he had nothing to suggest. Southey apparently could not help him to the Foreign Office. The only opening that can have seemed possible to him was literature. He might, for example, produce a volume of translations like the “Specimen of Russian Poets” (1820) of John Bowring, whom he met at Taylor’s. Bowring, a man of twenty-nine in 1821, was the head of a commercial firm and afterwards a friend of Borrow and the author of many translations from Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Servian, Hungarian and Bohemian song. He was, as the “Old Radical” of “The Romany Rye,” Borrow’s victim in his lifetime, and after his death the victim of Dr. Knapp as the supposed false friend of his hero. The mud thrown at him had long since dried, and has now been brushed off in a satisfactory manner by Mr. R. A. J. Walling. {72}

Tom Shelton, Jack Randall