MAY 1816–MARCH 1824
FOR the first time since his marriage, Captain Borrow found himself at
liberty to settle down and educate his sons. He had spent much of his
life in Norfolk, and he decided to remain there and make Norwich his
home. It was a quiet and beautiful old-world city: healthy, picturesque,
ancient, and, above all, possessed of a Grammar School, where George
could try and gather together the stray threads of education that he had
acquired at various times and in various dialects. It was an ideal city
for a warrior to take his rest in; but probably what counted most with
Captain Borrow was the Grammar School—more than the Norman Cathedral, the
grim old Castle that stands guardian-like upon its mound, the fact of its
being a garrison town, or even the traditions that surrounded the place.
He had two sons who must be appropriately sent out into the world, and
Norwich offered facilities for educating both. He accordingly took a
small house in Willow Lane, to which access was obtained by a covered
passage then called King’s, but now Borrow’s Court.
During the most nomadic portion of his life, when, with discouraging
rapidity, he was moving from place to place, Captain Borrow never for one
moment seems to have forgotten his obligations as a father. Whenever he
had been quartered in a town for a few months, he had sought out a school
to which to send John and George, notably at Huddersfield and Sheffield.
Had he known it, these precautions were unnecessary; for he had two sons
who were of what may be called the self-educating type: John, by virtue
of the quickness of his parts; George, on account of the strangeness of
his interests and his thirst for a knowledge of men and the tongues in
which they communicate to each other their ideas. It would be impossible
for an unconventional linguist, such as George Borrow was by instinct, to
remain uneducated, and it was equally impossible to educate him.
Quite unaware of the trend of his younger son’s genius, Captain Borrow
obtained for him a free-scholarship at the Grammar School, then under the
headmastership of the Rev. Edward Valpy, B.D., whose principal claims to
fame are his severity, his having flogged the conqueror of the “Flaming
Tinman,” and his destruction of the School Records of Admission, which
dated back to the Sixteenth Century. Among Borrow’s contemporaries at
the Grammar School were “Rajah” Brooke of Sarawak (for whose achievements
he in after life expressed a profound admiration), Sir Archdale Wilson of
Delhi, Colonel Charles Stoddart, Dr James Martineau, and Thomas Borrow
Burcham, the London Magistrate.
Borrow was now thirteen, and, it would appear, as determined as ever to
evade as much as possible academic learning. He was “far from an
industrious boy, fond of idling, and discovered no symptoms by his
progress either in Latin or Greek of that philology, so prominent a
feature of his last work (_Lavengro_).” {20} Borrow was an idler merely
because his work was uncongenial to him. “Mere idleness is the most
disagreeable state of existence, and both mind and body are continually
making efforts to escape from it,” he wrote in later years concerning
this period. He wanted an object in life, an occupation that would prove
not wholly uncongenial. That he should dislike the routine of school
life was not unnatural; for he had lived quite free from those
conventional restraints to which other boys of his age had always been
accustomed. Occupation of some sort he must have, if only to keep at a
distance that insistent melancholy that seems to have been for ever
hovering about him, and the tempter whispered “Languages.” {21a} One day
chance led him to a bookstall whereon lay a polyglot dictionary, “which
pretended to be an easy guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low
Dutch, and English.” He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from
the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he
found in the person of an old French _émigré_ priest, {21b} a study in
snuff-colour and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to
the accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies. The progress of
his pupil so much pleased the old priest that “after six months’ tuition,
the master would sometimes, on his occasional absences to teach in the
country, request his so forward pupil to attend for him his home
scholars.” {21c} It was M. D’Eterville who uttered the second recorded
prophecy concerning George Borrow: “Vous serez un jour un grand
philologue, mon cher,” he remarked, and heard that his pupil nourished
aspirations towards other things than mere philology.
In the study of French, Spanish, and Italian, Borrow spent many hours
that other boys would have devoted to pleasure; yet he was by no means a
student only. He found time to fish and to shoot, using a condemned,
honey-combed musket that bore the date of 1746. His fishing was done in
the river Yare, which flowed through the estate of John Joseph Gurney,
the Quaker-banker of Earlham Hall, two miles out of Norwich. It was here
that he was reproached by the voice, “clear and sonorous as a bell,” of
the banker himself; not for trespassing, but “for pulling all those fish
out of the water, and leaving them to gasp in the sun.”
At Harford Bridge, some two miles along the Ipswich Road, lived “the
terrible Thurtell,” a patron and companion of “the bruisers of England,”
who taught Borrow to box, and who ultimately ended his own inglorious
career by being hanged (9th January 1824) for the murder of Mr Weare, and
incidentally figuring in De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered As One of the
Fine Arts.” It was through “the king of flash-men” that Borrow saw his
first prize-fight at Eaton, near Norwich.
The passion for horses that came suddenly to Borrow with his first ride
upon the cob in Ireland had continued to grow. He had an opportunity of
gratifying it at the Norwich Horse Fair, held each Easter under the
shadow of the Castle, and famous throughout the country. {22} It was
here, in 1818, that Borrow encountered again Ambrose Petulengro, an event
that was to exercise a considerable influence upon his life. Mr
Petulengro had become the head of his tribe, his father and mother having
been transported for passing bad money. He was now a man, with a wife, a
child, and also a mother-in-law, who took a violent dislike to the tall,
fair-haired _gorgio_. Borrow’s life was much broadened by his
intercourse with Mr Petulengro. He was often at the gypsy encampment on
Mousehold, a heath just outside Norwich, where, under the tuition of his
host, he learned the Romany tongue with such rapidity as to astonish his
instructor and earn for him among the gypsies the name of “Lav-engro,”
word-fellow or word-master. He also boxed with the godlike Tawno Chikno,
who in turn pronounced him worthy to bear the name “Cooro-mengro,”
fist-fellow or fist-master. He frequently accompanied Mr Petulengro to
neighbouring fairs and markets, riding one of the gypsy’s horses. At
other times the two would roam over the gorse-covered Mousehold,
discoursing largely about things Romany.
The departure of Mr Petulengro and his retinue from Norwich threw Borrow
back once more upon his linguistic studies, his fishing, his shooting,
and his smouldering discontent at the constraints of school life. It was
probably an endeavour on Borrow’s part to make himself more like his
gypsy friends that prompted him to stain his face with walnut juice,
drawing from the Rev. Edward Valpy the question: “Borrow, are you
suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?” The gypsies were not the
only vagabonds of Borrow’s acquaintance at this period. There were the
Italian peripatetic vendors of weather-glasses, who had their
headquarters at Norwich. In after years he met again more than one of
these merchants. They were always glad to see him and revive old
memories of the Norwich days.
About this time he saved a boy from drowning in the Yare. {23} It may be
this act with which he generously credits his brother John when he says—
“I have known him dash from a steep bank into a stream in his full
dress, and pull out a man who was drowning; yet there were twenty
others bathing in the water, who might have saved him by putting out
a hand, without inconvenience to themselves, which, however, they did
not do, but stared with stupid surprise at the drowning one’s
struggles.” {24}
From the first Borrow had shown a strong distaste for the humdrum routine
of school life. In a thousand ways he was different from his fellows.
He had been accustomed to meet strange and, to him, deeply interesting
people. Now he was bidden adopt a course of life against which his whole
nature rebelled. It was impossible. He missed the atmosphere of
vagabondage that had inspired and stimulated his early boyhood.
The crisis came at last. There was only one way to avoid the awkward and
distasteful destiny that was being forced upon him. He entered into a
conspiracy with three school-fellows, all younger than himself, to make a
dash for a life that should offer wider opportunities to their
adventurous natures. The plan was to tramp to Great Yarmouth and there
excavate on the seashore caves for their habitation. From these
headquarters they would make foraging expeditions, and live on what they
could extract from the surrounding country, either by force or by the
terror that they inspired. One morning the four started on their
twenty-mile trudge to the sea; but, when only a few miles out, one of
their number became fearful and turned back.
Encouraged by their leader, the others continued on their way. The
father of the other two boys appears to have got wind of the project and
posted after them in a chaise. He came up with them at Acle, about
eleven miles from Norwich. When they were first seen, Borrow was
striving to hearten his fellow buccaneers, who were tired and dispirited
after their long walk. The three were unceremoniously bundled into the
chaise and returned to their homes and, subsequently, to the wrath of the
Rev. Edward Valpy. {25a}
The names of the three confederates were John Dalrymple (whose heart
failed him) and Theodosius and Francis Purland, sons of a Norwich
chemist. The Purlands are credited with robbing “the paternal till,”
while Dalrymple confined himself to the less compromising duty of
“gathering horse-pistols and potatoes.” If the boys robbed their
father’s till, why did they beg? In the ballad entitled _The Wandering
Children and the Benevolent Gentleman_, Borrow depicts the “eldest child”
as begging for charity for these hungry children, who have had “no
breakfast, save the haws.” This does not seem to suggest that the boys
were in the possession of money. Again, it was the father of one of
their schoolfellows who was responsible for their capture, according to
Dr Knapp, by asking them to dinner whilst he despatched a messenger to
the Rev. Edward Valpy. The story of Borrow’s being “horsed” on Dr
Martineau’s back is apocryphal. Martineau himself denied it. {25b}
There is no record of how Captain Borrow received the news of his younger
son’s breach of discipline. It probably reminded him that the boy was
now fifteen and it was time to think about his future. The old soldier
was puzzled. Not only had his second son shown a great partiality for
acquiring Continental tongues, but he had learned Irish, and Captain
Borrow seemed to think that by learning the language of Papists and
rebels, his son had sullied the family honour. To his father’s way of
thinking, this accomplishment seemed to bar him from most things that
were at one and the same time honourable and desirable.
The boy’s own inclinations pointed to the army; but Captain Borrow had
apparently seen too much of the army in war time, and the slowness of
promotion, to think of it as offering a career suitable to his son, now
that there was every prospect of a prolonged peace. He thought of the
church as an alternative; but here again that fatal facility the boy had
shown in learning Erse seemed to stand out as a barrier. “I have
observed the poor lad attentively and really I do not see what to make of
him,” Captain Borrow is said to have remarked. What could be expected of
a lad who would forsake Greek for Irish, or Latin for the barbarous
tongue of homeless vagabonds? Certainly not a good churchman. At length
it became obvious to the distressed parents that there was only one
choice left them—the law.
About this period Borrow fell ill of some nameless and unclassified
disease, which defied the wisdom of physicians, who shook their heads
gravely by his bedside. An old woman, however, cured him by a decoction
prepared from a bitter root. The convalescence was slow and laborious;
for the boy’s nerves were shattered, and that deep, haunting melancholy,
which he first called the “Fear” and afterwards the “Horrors,” descended
upon him.
On the 30th of March 1819 Borrow was articled for five years to Simpson &
Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, St Giles, Norwich. {26} He
consequently left home to take up his abode at the house of the senior
partner in the Upper Close. {27a} Mr William Simpson was a man of
considerable importance in the city; for besides being Treasurer of the
County, he was Chamberlain and Town Clerk, whilst his wife was famed for
her hospitality, in particular her expensive dinners.
With that unerring instinct of contrariety that never seemed to forsake
him, Borrow proceeded to learn, not law but Welsh. When the eyes of
authority were on him he transcribed Blackstone, but when they were
turned away he read and translated the poems of Ab Gwilym. He performed
his tasks “as well as could be expected in one who was occupied by so
many and busy thoughts of his own.”
At the end of Tuck’s Court was a house at which was employed a Welsh
groom, a queer fellow who soon attracted the notice of Simpson &
Rackham’s clerks, young gentlemen who were bent on “mis-spending the time
which was not legally their own.” {27b} They would make audible remarks
about the unfortunate and inoffensive Welsh groom, calling out after him
“Taffy”—in short, rendering the poor fellow’s life a misery with their
jibes, until at last, almost distracted, he had come to the determination
either to give his master notice or to hang himself, that he might get
away from that “nest of parcupines.” Borrow saw in the predicament of
the Welsh groom the hand of providence. He made a compact with him, that
in exchange for lessons in Welsh, he, Borrow, should persuade his fellow
clerks to cease their annoyance.
From that time, each Sunday afternoon, the Welsh groom would go to
Captain Borrow’s house to instruct his son in Welsh pronunciation; for in
book Welsh Borrow was stronger than his preceptor. Borrow had learned
the language of the bards “chiefly by going through Owen Pugh’s version
of ‘Paradise Lost’ twice” with the original by his side. After which
“there was very little in Welsh poetry that I could not make out with a
little pondering.” {28a} This had occupied some three years. The
studies with the groom lasted for about twelve months, until he left
Norwich with his family. {28b}
Captain Borrow’s thoughts were frequently occupied with the future of his
younger son, a problem that had by no means been determined by signing
the articles that bound him to Simpson & Rackham. The boy was frank and
honest and did not scruple to give expression to ideas of his own, and it
was these ideas that alarmed his father. Once at the house of Mr
Simpson, and before the assembled guests, he told an archdeacon, worth
£7000 a year, that the classics were much overvalued, and compared Ab
Gwilym with Ovid, to the detriment of the Roman. To Captain Borrow the
possession of ideas upon any subject by one so young was in itself a
thing to be deplored; but to venture an opinion contrary to that commonly
held by men of weight and substance was an unforgivable act of
insubordination.
The boy had been sent to Tuck’s Court to learn law, and instead he
persisted in acquiring languages, and such languages! Welsh, Danish,
Arabic, Armenian, Saxon; for these were the tongues with which he
occupied himself. None but a perfect mother such as Mrs Borrow could
have found excuses for a son who pursued such studies, and her husband
pointed out to her, it is “in the nature of women invariably to take the
part of the second born.”
In one of those curiously self-revelatory passages with which his
writings abound, Borrow tells how he continued to act as door-keeper long
after it had ceased to be part of his duty. As a student of men and a
collector of strange characters, it was in keeping with his genius to do
so, although he himself was unable to explain why he took pleasure in the
task. No one was admitted to the presence of the senior partner who did
not first pass the searching scrutiny of his articled clerk. Those who
pleased him were admitted to Mr Simpson’s private room; to those who did
not he proved himself an almost insuperable obstacle. Unfortunately
Borrow’s standards were those of the physiognomist rather than the
lawyer; he inverted the whole fabric of professional desirability by
admitting the goats and refusing the sheep. He turned away a knight, or
a baronet, and admitted a poet, until at last the distressed old
gentleman in black, with the philanthropical head, his master, was forced
to expostulate and adjure his clerk to judge, not by faces but by
clothes, which in reality make the man. Borrow bowed to the ruling of
“the prince of English solicitors,” revised his standards and continued
to act as keeper of the door.
Mr Simpson seems to have earned Borrow’s thorough regard, no small
achievement considering in how much he differed from his illustrious
articled-clerk in everything, not excepting humour, of which the
delightful, old-world gentleman seems to have had a generous share. He
was doubtless puzzled to classify the strange being by whose
instrumentality a stream of undesirable people was admitted to his
presence, whilst distinguished clients were sternly and rigorously turned
away. He probably smiled at the story of the old yeoman and his wife
who, in return for some civility shown to them by Borrow, presented him
with an old volume of Danish ballads, which inspired him to learn the
language, aided by a Danish Bible. {30a} He was not only “the first
solicitor in East Anglia,” but “the prince of all English solicitors—for
he was a gentleman!” {30b} In another place Borrow refers to him as “my
old master . . . who would have died sooner than broken his word. God
bless him!” {30c} And yet again as “my ancient master, the gentleman
solicitor of East Anglia.” {30d}
Borrow was always handsome in everything he did. If he hated a man he
hated him, his kith and kin and all who bore his name. His friendship
was similarly sweeping, and his regard for William Simpson prompted him
to write subsequently of the law as “a profession which abounds with
honourable men, and in which I believe there are fewer scamps than in any
other. The most honourable men I have ever known have been lawyers; they
were men whose word was their bond, and who would have preferred ruin to
breaking it.” {31a}
Fortunately for Borrow there was at the Norwich Guildhall a valuable
library consisting of a large number of ancient folios written in many
languages. “Amidst the dust and cobwebs of the Corporation Library” he
studied earnestly and, with a fine disregard for a librarian’s feelings,
annotated some of the volumes, his marginalia existing to this day. One
of his favourite works was the _Danica Literatura Antiquissima_ of Olaus
Wormius, 1636, which inspired him with the idea of adopting the name
Olaus, his subsequent contributions to _The New Magazine_ being signed
George Olaus Borrow.
Whilst Borrow was striving to learn languages and avoid the law, {31b}
the question of his brother’s career was seriously occupying the mind of
their father. Borrow loved and admired his brother. There is sincerity
in all he writes concerning John, and there is something of nobility
about the way in which he tells of his father’s preference for him.
“Who,” he asks, “cannot excuse the honest pride of the old man—the stout
old man?” {31c}
The Peace had closed to John Borrow the army as a profession, and he had
devoted himself assiduously to his art. Under Crome the elder he had
made considerable progress, and had exhibited a number of pictures at the
yearly exhibitions of the Norwich Society of Artists. He continued to
study with Crome until the artist’s death (22nd April 1821), when a new
master had to be sought. With his father’s blessing and £150 he
proceeded to London, where he remained for more than a year studying with
B. R. Haydon. {32a} Later he went to Paris to copy Old Masters.
About this time Borrow had an opportunity of seeing many of “the bruisers
of England.” In his veins flowed the blood of the man who had met Big
Ben Bryan and survived the encounter undefeated. “Let no one sneer at
the bruisers of England,” Borrow wrote—“What were the gladiators of Rome,
or the bull-fighters of Spain, in its palmiest days, compared to
England’s bruisers?” {32b} he asks. On 17th July 1820 Edward Painter of
Norwich was to meet Thomas Oliver of London for a purse of a hundred
guineas. On the Saturday previous (the 15th) the Norwich hotels began to
fill with bruisers and their patrons, and men went their ways anxiously
polite to the stranger, lest he turn out to be some champion whom it were
dangerous to affront. Thomas Cribb, the champion of England, had come to
see the fight, “Teucer Belcher, savage Shelton, . . . the terrible
Randall, . . . Bulldog Hudson, . . . fearless Scroggins, . . . Black
Richmond, . . . Tom of Bedford,” and a host of lesser lights of the
“Fancy.”
On the Monday, upwards of 20,000 men swept out of the old city towards
North Walsham, less than twenty miles distant, among them George Borrow,
striding along among the varied stream of men and vehicles (some 2000 in
number) to see the great fight, which was to end in the victory of the
local man and a terrible storm, as if heaven were thundering its anger
against a brutal spectacle. The sportsmen were left to find their way to
shelter, Borrow and Mr Petulengro, whom he had encountered just after the
fight, with them, talking of dukkeripens (fortunes).
Some time during the year 1820, a Jew named Levy (the Mousha of
_Lavengro_), Borrow’s instructor in Hebrew, introduced him to William
Taylor, {33a} one of the most extraordinary men that Norwich ever
produced. In the long-limbed young lawyer’s clerk, whose hair was
rapidly becoming grey, Taylor showed great interest, and, as an act of
friendship, undertook to teach him German. He was gratified by the young
man’s astonishing progress, and much interested in his remarkable
personality. As a result Borrow became a frequent visitor at 21 King
Street, Norwich, where Taylor lived and many strange men assembled.
It is doubtful if William Taylor ever found another pupil so apt, or a
disciple so enthusiastic among all the “harum-scarum young men” {33b}
that he was so fond of taking up and introducing “into the best society
the place afforded.” {33c} He was much impressed by Borrow’s
extraordinary memory and power of concentration. Speaking one day of the
different degrees of intelligence in men he said:—“I cannot give you a
better example to explain my meaning than my two pupils (there was
another named Cooke, who was said to be ‘a genius in his way’); what I
tell Borrow once he ever remembers; whilst to the fellow Cooke I have to
repeat the same thing twenty times, often without effect; and it is not
from want of memory either, but he will never be a linguist.” {33d}
To a correspondent Taylor wrote:—
“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.” {34a}
This was in 1821; two years later Borrow is said to have “translated with
fidelity and elegance from twenty different languages.” {34b} In spite
of his later achievements in learning languages, it seems scarcely
credible that he acquired eight separate languages in two years, although
it must be remembered that with him the learning of a language was to be
able to read it after a rather laborious fashion. Taylor, however, uses
the words “facility and elegance.”
[Picture: William Taylor of Norwich]
In the autobiographical notes that Borrow supplied to Mr John Longe in
1862 there appears the following passage:—
“At the expiration of his clerkship he knew little of the law, but he
was well versed in languages, being not only a good Greek and Latin
scholar, but acquainted with French, Italian, Spanish, all the Celtic
and Gothic dialects, and likewise with the peculiar language of the
English Romany Chals or gypsies.”
At William Taylor’s table Borrow met “the most intellectual and talented
men of Norwich, as also those of note who visited the city.” {34c}
Taylor was much interested in young men, into whose minds he did not
hesitate to instil his own ideas, ideas that not only earned for him the
name of “Godless Billy,” but outraged his respectable fellow-citizens as
much as did his intemperate habits. “His face was terribly bloated from
drink, and he had a look as if his intellect was almost as much decayed
as his body,” wrote a contemporary. {35a} “Matters grew worse in his old
age,” says Harriet Martineau, “when his habits of intemperance kept him
out of the sight of ladies, and he got round him a set of ignorant and
conceited young men, who thought they could set the whole world right by
their destructive propensities. One of his chief favourites was George
Borrow.” {35b} Borrow has given the following convincing picture of
Taylor:
“Methought I was in a small, comfortable room wainscotted with oak; I
was seated on one side of a fireplace, close by a table on which were
wine and fruit; on the other side of the fire sat a man in a plain
suit of brown, with the hair combed back from the somewhat high
forehead; he had a pipe in his mouth, which for some time he smoked
gravely and placidly, without saying a word; at length, after drawing
at the pipe for some time rather vigorously, he removed it from his
mouth, and emitting an accumulated cloud of smoke, he exclaimed in a
slow and measured tone: ‘As I was telling you just now, my good chap,
I have always been an enemy of humbug.’” {35c}
William Taylor appears to have flattered “the harum-scarum young men”
with whom he surrounded himself by talking to them as if they were his
intellectual equals. He encouraged them to form their own opinions, in
itself a thing scarcely likely to make him popular with either parents or
guardians, least of all with discipline-loving Captain Borrow, who
declined even to return the salute of his son’s friend on the public
highway.
Borrow now began to look to the future and speculate as to what his
present life would lead to. His cogitations seem to have ended, almost
invariably, in a gloomy mist of pessimism and despair—in other words, an
attack of the “Horrors.” If Mr Petulengro were encamped upon Mousehold,
the antidote lay near to hand in his friend’s pagan optimism; if, on the
other hand, the tents of Egypt were pitched on other soil, there was no
remedy, unless perhaps a prize-fight supplied the necessary stimulus to
divert his thoughts from their melancholy trend.
[Picture: George Borrow (1821). From a hitherto unpublished painting by
John Borrow, now in the posession of W. F. T. Jarrold, Esq.]
Borrow met at the house of his tutor and friend, in July 1821, Dr Bowring
{36a} (afterwards Sir John) at a dinner given in his honour. Bowring had
recently published _Specimen of Russian Poets_, in recognition of which
the Czar (Alexander I.) had presented him with a diamond ring. He had a
considerable reputation as a linguist, which naturally attracted Borrow
to him. Dr Bowring was told of Borrow’s accomplishments, and during the
evening took a seat beside him. Borrow confessed to being “a little
frightened at first” of the distinguished man, whom he described as
having “a thin weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity
of vision, and a large pair of spectacles.” It would be dangerous to
accept entirely the account that Borrow gives of the meeting, {36b}
because when that was written he had come to hate and despise the man
whom he had begun by regarding with such awe. Bowring appears to have
ventilated his views with some freedom, and to have had a rather serious
passage of arms with another guest whom he had rudely contradicted. It
is very probable that Borrow’s dislike of Bowring prompted him to
exaggerate his account of what happened at Taylor’s house that evening.
Whilst Borrow was industriously occupied in collecting vagabonds and
imbibing the dangerous beliefs of William Taylor, there sat in an
easy-chair in the small front-parlour of the little house in Willow Lane,
in a faded regimental coat, a prematurely old man, whose frame still
showed signs of the magnificent physique of his vigorous manhood.
“Sometimes in prayer, sometimes in meditation, and sometimes in reading
the Scriptures,” with his dog beside him, Captain Thomas Borrow, now
sixty-five, was preparing for the end that he felt to be approaching. He
frequently meditated upon what was to become of his younger son George,
who held his father in such awe as to feel ill at ease when alone with
him.
One day the inevitable interrogation took place. “What do you propose to
do?” and the equally inevitable reply followed, “I really do not know
what I shall do.” In the course of a somewhat lengthy cross-examination,
Captain Borrow discovered that his son knew the Armenian tongue, for
which he very cunningly strove to enlist his father’s interest by telling
him that in Armenia was Mount Ararat, whereon the ark rested. Captain
Borrow also discovered that his son could not only shoe a horse, but also
make the shoes; but, what was most important, he found that George had
learned “very little” law. When asked if he thought he could support
himself by Armenian or his “other acquirements,” the younger man was not
very hopeful, and horrified the old soldier by suggesting that if all
else failed there was always suicide.
The dying man was thus left to yearn for the return of his elder son, in
whom all his hopes lay centred. John appears to have been by no means
dutiful to his parents in the matter of letters. For six months he left
them unacquainted even with his address in Paris, where he was still
copying Old Masters in the Louvre.
After their talk the father and younger son seem to have come to a better
understanding. George would frequently read aloud from the Bible, whilst
Captain Borrow would tell about his early life. His son “had no idea
that he knew and had seen so much; my respect for him increased, and I
looked upon him almost with admiration. His anecdotes were in general
highly curious; some of them related to people in the highest stations,
and to men whose names are closely connected with some of the brightest
glories of our native land.” {38}
At last John arrived, apparently a little disillusioned with the world;
but the coming of his favourite son produced no change for the better in
Captain Borrow’s health. He was content and happy that God had granted
his wish. There remained nothing now to do but “to bless my little
family and go.” George learned “that it is possible to feel deeply and
yet make no outward sign.”
The end came on the morning of 28th February 1824. It was by a strange
chance that the old man should die in the arms of his younger son, who
had run down on hearing his mother’s anguished screams. Borrow has given
a dramatic account of his father’s last moments:—
“At the dead hour of night, it might be about two, I was awakened
from sleep by a cry which sounded from the room immediately below
that in which I slept. I knew the cry, it was the cry of my mother,
and I also knew its import; yet I made no effort to rise, for I was
for the moment paralysed. Again the cry sounded, yet still I lay
motionless—the stupidity of horror was upon me. A third time, and it
was then that, by a violent effort bursting the spell which appeared
to bind me, I sprang from the bed and rushed downstairs. My mother
was running wildly about the room; she had awoke and found my father
senseless in the bed by her side. I essayed to raise him, and after
a few efforts supported him in the bed in a sitting posture. My
brother now rushed in, and snatching a light that was burning, he
held it to my father’s face. ‘The surgeon, the surgeon!’ he cried;
then dropping the light, he ran out of the room followed by my
mother; I remained alone, supporting the senseless form of my father;
the light had been extinguished by the fall, and an almost total
darkness reigned in the room. The form pressed heavily against my
bosom—at last methought it moved. Yes, I was right, there was a
heaving of the breast, and then a gasping. Were those words which I
heard? Yes, they were words, low and indistinct at first, and then
audible. The mind of the dying man was reverting to former scenes.
I heard him mention names which I had often heard him mention before.
It was an awful moment; I felt stupified, but I still contrived to
support my dying father. There was a pause, again my father spoke: I
heard him speak of Minden, and of Meredith, the old Minden sergeant,
and then he uttered another name, which at one period of his life was
much on his lips, the name of—but this is a solemn moment! There was
a deep gasp: I shook, and thought all was over; but I was mistaken—my
father moved and revived for a moment; he supported himself in bed
without my assistance. I make no doubt that for a moment he was
perfectly sensible, and it was then that, clasping his hands, he
uttered another name clearly, distinctly—it was the name of Christ.
With that name upon his lips, the brave old soldier sank back upon my
bosom, and, with his hands still clasped, yielded up his soul.” {39}