George Borrow in East Anglia

"The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship."--EMERSON.

LONDON DAVID NUTT, 270-271, STRAND 1896

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE I. EAST ANGLIA 7 II. EARLY DAYS 12 III. THE LAWYER'S CLERK 19 IV. DAYS IN NORWICH 29 V. LIFE AT OULTON 39 VI. BORROW AND PUGILISM 60 VII. BORROW AND THE EAST ANGLIAN GIPSIES 68

"Apart from Borrow's undoubted genius as a writer, the subject-matter of his writings has an interest that will not wane, but will go on growing. The more the features of our 'Beautiful England,' to use his own phrase, are changed by the multitudinous effects of the railway system, the more attraction will readers find in books which depict her before her beauty was marred--books which picture her in those antediluvian days when there was such a thing as space in the island--when in England there was a sense of distance, that sense without which there can be no romance--when the stage-coach was in its glory, when the only magician that could convey man and his belongings at any rate of speed beyond man's own walking rate was the horse--the beloved horse whose praises Borrow loved to sing, and whose ideal was reached in the mighty 'Shales'--when the great high roads were alive, not merely with the bustle of business, but with real adventure for the traveller--days and scenes which Borrow, better than any one else, could paint."

THEODORE WATTS.

CHAPTER I: EAST ANGLIA

It is a trite saying, the truth of which is so universally admitted that it is hardly worth repeating, that a man's memory, above all things, retains most vividly recollections of the scenes amidst which he passed his early days. Amidst the loneliness of the African veldt or American prairie solitudes, the West-countryman dreams of Devon's grassy tors and honeysuckle lanes, and Cornish headlands, fretted by the foaming waves of the grey Atlantic; in teaming cities, where the pulse of life beats loud and strong, the Scotsman ever cherishes sweet, sad thoughts of the braes and burns about his Highland home; between the close-packed roofs of a London alley, the Italian immigrant sees the sunny skies and deep blue seas of his native land, the German pictures to himself the loveliness of the legend-haunted Rhineland, and the Scandinavian, closing his eyes and ears to the squalor and misery, wonders whether the sea-birds still circle above the stone-built cottage in the Nordland cleft, and cry weirdly from the darkness as they sweep landward in the night. Many a wanderer, whatever else he may let go, holds in his heart the hope that one day he may go back to the place where his boyhood's days were spent, even though it be but to dwell alone amidst the phantoms of long dead dreams and long lost loves.