George Borrow and His Circle | Page 4

manner superseded or at least supplemented by the
appearance of still more documents. However, Mr. Jenkins's excellent
biography has the advantage of many new documents from Mr. John
Murray's archives and from the Record Office Manuscripts. His work
was the first to make use of the letters of George Borrow to the Bible
Society, which the Rev. T. H. Darlow has published as a book under
that title, a book to which I owe him an acknowledgment for such use
of it as I have made, as also for permission to reproduce the title-page
of Borrow's Basque version of St. Luke's gospel. There only remains
for me to say a word in praise of Mr. Edward Thomas's fine critical
study of Borrow which was published under the title of George Borrow:
The Man and his Books. Mr. Thomas makes no claim to the possession
of new documents. This brings me to such excuse as I can make for
perpetrating a fifth biography. When Mrs. MacOubrey, Borrow's
stepdaughter, the 'Hen.' of Wild Wales and the affectionate companion
of his later years, sold her father's books and manuscripts--and she
always to her dying day declared that she had no intention of parting
with the manuscripts, which were, she said, taken away under a
misapprehension--she did not, of course, part with any of his more
private documents. All the more intimate letters of Borrow were
retained. At her death these passed to her executors, from whom I have
purchased all legal rights in the publication of Borrow's hitherto
unpublished manuscripts and letters. I trust that even to those who may
disapprove of the discursive method with which--solely for my own

pleasure--I have written this book, will at least find a certain
biographical value in the many new letters by and to George Borrow
that are to be found in its pages. The book has taken me ten years to
write, and has been a labour of love.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] As for example, Garrick and his Circle; Johnson and his Circle;
Reynolds and his Circle; and even The Empress Eugénie and her
Circle.
[2] William Ireland Knapp died in Paris in June 1908, aged
seventy-four. He was an American, and had held for many years the
Chair of Modern Languages at Vassar College. After eleven years in
Spain he returned to occupy the Chair of Modern Languages at Yale,
and later held a Professorship at Chicago. After his Life of Borrow was
published he resided in Paris until his death.
CHAPTER I
CAPTAIN BORROW OF THE WEST NORFOLK MILITIA
George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham,
Norfolk, on the 5th of July 1803. It pleased him to state on many an
occasion that he was born at East Dereham.
On an evening of July, in the year 18--, at East D----, a beautiful little
town in a certain district of East Anglia, I first saw the light,
he writes in the opening lines of Lavengro, using almost the identical
phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe's Wahrheit und
Dichtung. Here is a later memory of Dereham from Lavengro:
What it is at present I know not, for thirty years and more have elapsed
since I last trod its streets. It will scarcely have improved, for how
could it be better than it was? I love to think on thee, pretty, quiet D----,
thou pattern of an English country town, with thy clean but narrow
streets branching out from thy modest market-place, with their

old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable thatch,
with thy one half-aristocratic mansion, where resided the Lady
Bountiful--she, the generous and kind, who loved to visit the sick,
leaning on her golden-headed cane, while the sleek old footman walked
at a respectful distance behind. Pretty, quiet D----, with thy venerable
church, in which moulder the mortal remains of England's sweetest and
most pious bard.
Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of
Lavengro know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William
Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of
poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in
which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing
for a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the
neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of The Task.
Yet Borrow was not actually born in East Dereham, but a mile and a
half away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a
glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet
landscape of fields and hedges. You will find the home in which the
author of Lavengro first saw the