[11a] Lavengro, ch. xiv.[11b] Ibid., ch. xxiii.[15] Lavengro, ch. xxxvii.[20] Lavengro, ch. xxv.[21] Life of B. R. Haydon, by Tom Taylor, 1853, vol. ii. p. 21.[22] Benjamin Robert Haydon: Correspondence and Table Talk, with a Memoir by his son, Frederic Wordsworth Haydon, vol. i. pp. 360–1.[33a] The Bible in Spain, ch. xx.[33b] Dr. Johnson was the first as Borrow was the second to earn this distinction. Johnson, as reported by Boswell, says:

“I have long wished that the Irish literature were cultivated. Ireland is known by tradition to have been once the seat of piety and learning, and surely it would be very acceptable to all those who are curious on the origin of nations or the affinities of languages to be further informed of the evolution of a people so ancient and once so illustrious. I hope that you will continue to cultivate this kind of learning which has too long been neglected, and which, if it be suffered to remain in oblivion for another century, may perhaps never be retrieved.”

[34] Lavengro.[39] Three Generations of Englishwomen, by Janet Ross, vol. i. p. 3.[42] Reprinted in Carlyle’s Miscellanies.[47] This is a contemptuous reference in Martineau’s own words to “George Borrow, the writer and actor of romance.”[49] Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by Herself, ch. xvii.[50] Norvicensian, 1888, p. 177.[51] The Britannia newspaper, 26th June, 1851.[54] Mr. C. F. Martelli of Staple Inn, London, who has so generously placed this information at my disposal. Mr. Martelli writes:

“Old memories brought him to our office for professional advice, and there I saw something of him, and a very striking personality he was, and a rather difficult client to do business with. One peculiarity I remember was that he believed himself to be plagued by autograph hunters, and was reluctant to trust our firm with his signature in any shape or form, and that we in consequence had some trouble in inducing him to sign his will. I have seen him sitting over my fire in my room at that office for hours, half asleep, and crooning out Romany songs while waiting for my chief.”

[58] In Lavengro.[62] Life and Death of Faustus, p. 59.[67a] Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence from the Earliest Records to the Year 1825. In six volumes. London: Printed for Geo. Knight & Lacey, Paternoster Row, 1825. Price £3 12 s. in boards.[67b] The New and Complete Newgate Calendar or Malefactors Recording Register. By William Jackson. Six vols. 1802.[67c] Cobbett and Howell’s State Trials. In thirty-three volumes and index, 1809 to 1828. The last volume, apart from the index, was actually published the year after Borrow’s Celebrated Trials, that is, in 1826; but the last trial recorded was that of Thistlewood in 1820. The editors were William Cobbett, Thomas Bayly Howell, and his son, Thomas Jones Howell.[70] Another witness attained fame by her answer to the inquiry, “Was supper postponed?” with the reply, “No, it was pork.”[79] Only thus can we explain Borrow’s later declaration that he had four times been in prison.[80a] Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police until 1827, and now proprietor of the paper manufactory at St. MandÉ. Written by himself. Translated from the French. In Four Volumes. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot, Ave Maria Lane, 1829.[80b] This with other documents I have presented to the Borrow Museum, Norwich.[80c] In 1830 Borrow had another disappointment. He translated The Sleeping Bard from the Welsh. This also failed to find a publisher. It was issued in 1860, under which date we discuss it.

[91a] Keep not standing, fixed and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam:
Head and hand, where’er thou foot it,
And stout heart, are still at home.
In each land the sun does visit:
We are gay whate’er betide.
To give room for wandering is it,
That the world was made so wide.

(Carlyle’s translation.)

[91b] Through the will of his stepdaughter, Henrietta MacOubrey.[92] Canton’s History of the Bible Society, vol. i. 195.[102] Letters of George Borrow to the British and Foreign Bible Society, published by Direction of the Committee. Edited by T. H. Darlow. Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. The Russian Correspondence occupies pages 1–97.[103a] Darlow: Letters to the Bible Society, p. 32.[103b] Ibid., p. 47.[103c] Ibid., pp. 60, 61.[104] Mr. Glen.[105] Darlow: Letters to the Bible Society, p. 96.[106] Darlow: Letters to the Bible Society, p. 65.[107] Darlow: Letters to the Bible Society, p. 81.[110] Norfolk Chronicle, 17th October, 1835.[113] When in Madrid in May, 1913, I called upon Mr. William Summers, the courteous Secretary of the Madrid Branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the Flor Alta. Mr. Summers informs me that the issues of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Bibles and Testaments, in Spain for the years 1910–12 are as follows:

The Calle del Principe is now rapidly being pulled down and new buildings taking the place of those Borrow knew.[145a] The following suggestion has, however, been made to me by a friend of Henrietta MacOubrey, nÉe Clarke:

“I think Borrow intended ‘Carreta’ for ‘dearest.’ It is impossible to think that he would call his wife a ‘cart.’ Perhaps he intended ‘Carreta’ for ‘Querida.’ Probably their pronunciation was not Castillian, and they spelled the word as they pronounced it. In speaking of her to ‘Hen.’ Borrow always called her ‘Mamma.’ Mrs. MacOubrey took a great fancy to me because she said I was like ‘Mamma.’ She meant in character, not in person.”

[148] Knapp’s Life, vol. i. p. 378.[151] The Academy, 13th June, 1874.[155] This was Miss Catherine Gurney, who was born in 1776, in Magdalen Street, Norwich, and died at Lowestoft in 1850, aged seventy-five. She twice presided over the Earlham home. The brother referred to was Joseph John Gurney.[159] 4750 copies were sold in the three volume form in 1843, and a sixth and cheaper edition the same year sold 9000 copies.[164] The Times, 12th April, 1843.[197] The whole of this diary will be issued in my edition of The Collected Works. It has appeared, with my permission, in the Manx Folk Lore Magazine, Mannin, November, 1914.[199] They lived first at 169 King Street, then at two addresses unknown, then successively at 37, 38 and 39 Camperdown Terrace; their last address was 28 Trafalgar Place.[229] I am indebted to Mr. Edward Heron-Allen for the information that this is the original of the last verse but one in FitzGerald’s first version of the RubÁiyÁt:

r 74.

Ah Moon of my Delight, who knowest no wane,
The Moon of Heaven is rising once again,
How oft, hereafter rising, shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain.

[255] Henrietta’s guitar is now in my possession and is a very handsome instrument.[256] Henrietta MacOubrey put every difficulty in the way of Dr. Knapp, and I hold many letters from her strongly denouncing his Life.[268] A word that is very misleading, as no writer was ever so little the founder of a school.[269a] Although this fact was not known until 1908 when I published The BrontËs: Life and Letters. See vol. ii. p. 24, where Charlotte BrontË writes: “In George Borrow’s works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity, which give them a stamp of their own.”[269b] Theodore Watts-Dunton, Augustine Birrell and Francis Hindes Groome. Lionel Johnson’s essay on Borrow is the more valuable in its enthusiasm in that it was written by a Roman Catholic. Writing in the Outlook (1st April, 1899) he said:

“What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort. Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of ‘civilised’ life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can say, though he would not have you say it—Requiescat in pace Viator.”

[269c] In Res JudicatÆ, 1892 (a paper reprinted from The Reflector, 8th January, 1888), in his introduction to Lavengro (Macmillan, 1900), in an essay entitled “The Office of Literature,” in the second series of Obiter Dicta, and in an address at Norwich, on 5th July, 1913, reprinted in full in the Eastern Daily Press of 7th July, 1913.[270a] There are but three references to Borrow in Stevenson’s writings, all of them perfunctory. These are in Memories and Portraits (“A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’”), in Familiar Studies of Men and Books (“Some Aspects of Robert Burns”), and in The Ideal House.[270b] The Spectator, 12th July, 1913.