Isopel Berners | Page 2

authority, is astonishing. As well might a raw recruit pretend to offer an
unfavourable opinion on the manual and platoon exercise. The idea is
preposterous; the lad is too independent by half."
Borrow's account of his father's death is a highly affecting piece of
English. The ironical humour blent with pathos in his picture of this
ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart
with a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of
"My Uncle Toby"), the details of the ailments and the portents that
attended his infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the
wandering military life from barrack to barrack and from garrison to
garrison, inevitably remind the reader of the childish reminiscences of
Laurence Sterne, a writer to whom it may thus early be said that
George Borrow paid no small amount of unconscious homage. A
homage of another sort, fully recognised and declared, was that paid to
the great work of Defoe, and to the spirit of strange and romantic
enterprise which it aroused in its reader.
After Robinson Crusoe there played across the disk of his youthful
memory a number of weird and hairy figures never to be effaced. A
strange old herbalist and snake-killer with a skin cap first whetted his
appetite for the captivating confidences of roadside vagrants, and the
acquaintanceship serves as an introduction to the scene of the gipsy
encampment, where the young Sapengro or serpent charmer was first
claimed as brother by Jasper Petulengro. The picture of the
encampment may serve as an example of Borrovian prose, nervous,
unembarrassed, and graphic.
One day it happened, being on my rambles, I entered a green lane
which I had never seen before. At first it was rather narrow, but as I
advanced it became considerably wider. In the middle was a drift-way
with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward of
trefoil and clover. There was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient oaks,
which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a canopy
and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which was

burning fiercely above. Suddenly a group of objects attracted my
attention. Beneath one of the largest of the trees, upon the grass, was a
kind of low tent or booth, from the top of which a thin smoke was
curling. Beside it stood a couple of light carts, whilst two or three lean
horses or ponies were cropping the herbage which was growing
nigh. . . .
As a pendant to the landscape take a Flemish interior. The home of the
Borrows had been removed in the meantime, in accordance with the
roving traditions of the family, from Norman Cross to Edinburgh and
from Edinburgh to Clonmel.
And to the school I went [at Clonmel], where I read the Latin tongue
and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman who sat behind a black
oaken desk with a huge Elzevir Flaccus before him, in a long gloomy
kind of hall with a broken stone floor, the roof festooned with cobwebs,
the walls considerably dilapidated and covered over with stray figures
in hieroglyphics evidently produced by the application of a burnt stick.
In Ireland, too, he made the acquaintance of the gossoon Murtagh, who
taught him Irish in return for a pack of cards. In the course of his
wanderings with his father's regiment he develops into a well-grown
and well-favoured lad, a shrewd walker and a bold rider. "People may
talk of first love--it is a very agreeable event, I dare say--but give me
the flush, the triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride." {5}
At Norwich he learns modern languages from an old emigre, a true
disciple of the ancien cour, who sets Boileau high above Dante; and
some misty German metaphysics from the Norwich philosopher, who
consistently seeks a solace in smoke from the troubles of life. His
father had already noted his tendency to fly off at a tangent which was
strikingly exhibited in the lawyer's office, where "within the womb of a
lofty deal desk," when he should have been imbibing Blackstone and
transcribing legal documents, he was studying Monsieur Vidocq and
translating the Welsh bard Ab Gwilym; he was consigning his legal
career to an early grave when he wrote this elegy on the worthy
attorney his master.

He has long since sunk to his place in a respectable vault, in the aisle of
a very respectable church, whilst an exceedingly respectable marble
slab against the neighbouring wall tells on a Sunday some eye
wandering from its prayer-book that his dust lies below. To secure such
respectabilities in death he passed a most respectable life, a more
respectable-looking individual never was seen.
In the meantime as a sequel to