ct of my subject than I should have done
had I been addressing any other audience than a Norwich one. But the
fact is that all the gossip and backbiting and censoriousness that has
gathered round Borrow for a hundred years has come out of this very city,
commencing with the "bursts of laughter" that, according to Miss
Martineau, greeted Borrow's travels in Spain for the Bible Society.
Borrow was twenty-one years of age when he left Norwich to make his way
in the world. During the next twenty years he may have undergone many
changes of intellectual view, as most of us do, as Miss Martineau notably
did, and Miss Martineau and her laughing friends were diabolically
uncharitable. That lack of charity followed Borrow throughout his life.
He was libelled by many, by Miss Frances Power Cobbe most of all.
However, the great city of Norwich will make up for it in the future, and
she will love Borrow as Borrow indisputably loved her. How he praised
her fine cathedral, her lordly castle, her Mousehold Heath, her meadows
in which he once saw a prize fight, her pleasant scenery--no city, not
even glorious Oxford, has been so well and adequately praised, and I
desire to show that that praise is not for an age but for all time.

If George Borrow has not been happy in his biographer, and if, as is
true, he has received but inadequate treatment on this account--such
series of little books as _The English Men of Letters_ and the _Great
Writers_ quite ignoring him--he has been equally unfortunate in his
critics. There are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations in
print of Borrow's works. While other great names in the great literature
of the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there has
scarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were in
an audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow's supreme merits,
which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that they
could see but small merit in Borrow themselves, but were prepared to
accept him if only I could bring good authority that he was a very great
writer, I should be hardly put to to comply with the demand. I can only
name Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton and Mr. Augustine Birrell as critics of
considerable status who have praised Borrow well. "The delightful, the
bewitching, the never sufficiently-to-be-praised George Borrow," says Mr.
Birrell in one of the essays he has written on the subject; {84} while
Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunt