knowledge of Gaelic--settled down for some of his most
impressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man of
twenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six. Dr. James Martineau was
eleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equally
clever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was Sarah
Taylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd of
Norwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce a
picture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter of
a century onward--a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley's {66}
occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from all
parts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is my
pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very
least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of
his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death,
was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this
beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its
nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition.

For whatever homage may have fallen to Borrow during the half-century or
more since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must be
admitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city,
I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of the
Stanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part of
your literary and intellectual history during this very period. But I
turn in vain to a number of books that I have in my library for any
information concerning one who is indisputably the greatest among the
intellectual children of Norwich. I turn to Mr. Prothero's _Life of Dean
Stanley_--not one word about Borrow; to that pleasant _Memoir_ of Sarah
Austin and her mother, Mrs. Taylor, called _Three Generations of a
Norfolk Family_--again not one word. I turn to Mr. Braithwaite's
biography of Joseph John Gurney, and to Mr. Augustus Hare's book _The
Gurneys of Earlham_--upon these worthy biographers Borrow made no
impression whatever, although Joseph John Gurney was personally helpful
to him and we read in _Lavengro_ of that pleasant meeting between the
pair on the river bank when Mr. Gurney chided the boy Borrow or Lavengro
for angling. "From that day," he says, "I became less and less a
practitioner of that c