great and
good Englishman--the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town.

III. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE BORROW

An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary,
1903.

One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasant
little town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christened
George Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. I
count it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary history
that only three years earlier there should have left the world in the
same little town--a town only known perhaps to those of us who are
Norfolk men--a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest
glories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April,
1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of East
Dereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likeness
or of contrast must surely end.

Cowper and Borrow do, indeed, come into some trivial kind of kinship at
one or two points. In reading Cowper's beautiful letters I have come
across two addressed by him to one Richard Phillips, a bookseller of that
day, who had been in prison for publishing some of Thomas Paine's works.
Cowper had been asked by Phillips to write a sympathetic poem
denunciatory of the political and religious tyranny that had sent
Phillips to jail. Cowper had at first agreed, but was afterwards advised
not to have anything more to do with Phillips. Judging by the after
career of Phillips, Cowper did wisely; for Phillips was not a good man,
although twenty years later he had become a sheriff of London and was
knighted. As Sir Richard Phillips he was visited by George Borrow, then
a youth at the beginning of his career. Borrow came to Phillips armed
with an introduction from William Taylor of Norwich, and his reception is
most dramatically recorded in the pages of _Lavengro_. This is, however,
to anticipate. Then there is a poem by Cowper to Sir John Fenn {62} the
antiquary, the first editor of the famous _Paston Letters_. In it there
is a reference to Fenn's spouse, who, under the pseudonym of "Mrs.
Teachwell," wrote many books for children in her day. Now Borrow could
remember this lady--Dame Eleanor Fenn--when he was a boy. He recalled
the "Lady Bountiful leaning on her gold-headed cane, while the sleek old
footman followed at a respectful distance behind." Lady Fenn was forty-
six