years old when Cowper referred to her. She was sixty-six when the
boy Borrow saw her in Dereham streets. At no other points do these great
East Dereham writers come upon common ground: Cowper during the greater
part of his life was a recluse. He practically fled from the world. In
reading the many letters he wrote--and they are among the best letters in
the English language--one is struck by the small number of his
correspondents. He had few acquaintances and still fewer friends. He
had never seen a hill until he was sixty, and then it was only the modest
hills of Sussex that seemed to him so supremely glorious. He was never
on the Continent. For half a lifetime he did not move out of one county,
the least picturesque part of Buckinghamshire, the neighbourhood of Olney
and of Weston. There he wrote the poems that have been a delight to
several generations, poems which although they may have gone out of
fashion with many are still very dear to some among us; and there, as I
have said, he wrote the incomparable letters that have an equally
permanent place in literature.

You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life of
this other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met to
celebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who had
risen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldier
and actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. The
soldier was a Cornishman by birth, the actress was of French origin, and
so you have blended in this little Norfolk boy--who is a Norfolk boy in
spite of it all--every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery,
imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of those
of us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of our
progenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwich
world into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age.
That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. In
the year of Borrow's birth John Gurney, who died six years later, first
became a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph John
Gurney--aged fifteen--left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford.
His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. So
that when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier--who
had already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotland
adding to his