o;
I have seen him get through two bottles by himself.' By this time Latham
was a little unsteady, he slipped from his chair as if it had been an
inclined plane and lay on the carpet. He was unable to rise, but he held
his head up with a cunning smile, saying, 'This must be a very
disreputable house.' Borrow saw Latham after this at times on his way to
me, and always stopped to say a kind word to him, seeing his forlorn
condition."

Given as he was to snubbing and browbeating others, Borrow was not a man
to sit silent and see another man badly treated without raising hand or
voice in his defence. Proof of this is found in an instructive story
related by Mr. J. Ewing Ritchie in his chatty "East Anglian
Reminiscences." "One good anecdote I heard about George Borrow," writes
Mr. Ritchie. "My informant was an Independent minister, at the time
supplying the pulpit at Lowestoft and staying at Oulton Hall, then
inhabited by a worthy dissenting tenant. One night a meeting of the
Bible Society was held at Mutford Bridge, at which the party from the
Hall attended, and where George Borrow was one of the speakers. After
the meeting was over, all the speakers went back to supper at Oulton
Hall, and my friend among them, who, in the course of the supper, found
himself violently attacked by a clergyman for holding Calvinistic
opinions. Naturally my friend replied that the clergyman was bound to do
the same. 'How do you make that out?' 'Why, the Articles of your Church
are Calvinistic, and to them you have sworn assent!' 'Oh yes, but there
is a way of explaining them away!' 'How so?' said my friend. 'Oh,'
replied the clergyman, 'we are not bound to take the words in their
natural sense.' My friend, an honest, blunt East Anglian, intimated that
he did not understand that way of evading the difficulty; but he was then
a young man and did not like to continue the discussion further.
However, George Borrow, who had not said a word hitherto, entered into
the discussion, opening fire on the clergyman in a very unexpected
manner, and giving him such a setting down as the hearers, at any rate,
never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms
was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every
point. 'Never,' says my friend, 'did I hear one man give another such a
dressing as on that occasion.'"

* * * * *

Borrow was often asked by visitors to Oulton