ool were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George Borrow, a
hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to undergo a
flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never afterwards took
kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We are glad to know
that Edward Valpy's ferule was weak, though his scholarship was strong.
Stories were current that even in those days George used to haunt the
gipsy tents on that Mousehold Heath which lives eternally in the breezy
canvases of "Old Crome," and that he went so far as to stain his face
with walnut-juice to the right Egyptian hue. "Are you suffering from
jaundice, Borrow," asked the Doctor, "or is it merely dirt?" While at
Norwich, too, he was greatly influenced in the direction of linguistics
by the English "pocket Goethe," William Taylor, the head of a clan known
as the Taylors of Norwich, to distinguish them from a race in which the
principle of heredity was even more strikingly developed--the Taylors of
Ongar. In February 1824 his father, the gallant Captain Thomas Borrow,
died, and his articles in the firm of a Norwich solicitor having
determined, George went to London to commence literary man, in the old
sense of the servitude, under the well-known bookseller-publisher, Sir
Richard Phillipps. In Grub Street he translated and compiled galore, but
when the trees began to shoot in 1825 he broke his chain and escaped to
the country, to the dingle, and to Isopel Berners.

To dwell upon the bare outlines of Borrow's early career would be a
superfluously dull proceeding. We shall only add a few names and dates
to the framework, supplied with a fidelity that is rare in much more
formal works of autobiography, in the pages of _Lavengro_. From the same
pages we may detach just a few of the earlier influences which went to
make up the rare and complex individuality of the writer. Borrow's
father, a fine old soldier, in revealing his son's youthful idiosyncrasy,
projects a clear mental image of his own habit of mind. "The boy had the
impertinence to say the classics were much over-valued, and amongst other
things that some horrid fellow or other, some Welshman, I think (thank
God it was not an Irishman), was a better poet than Ovid. {2} That a boy
of his years should entertain an opinion of his own, I mean one which
militates against all established authority, is astonishing. As well
might a raw recruit pretend to offer an unfavourable opinion on the