burn's
copy in the British Museum):

Able and willing, you all will find
Though bound in chains, still free in mind,
For with these things I'll ne'er be grieved
Although of freedom I'm bereaved.

Now for the crime that I'm condemn'd,
The same I never did intend,
Only my liberty to take,
As I thought my life did lie at stake.

D. IRELAND AND MURTAGH.--We may pass over the brief sojourn in Norwich
that was Borrow's lot in 1814, when the West Norfolk Militia left
Scotland. When Napoleon escaped from Elba the West Norfolk Regiment was
despatched to Ireland, and Captain Borrow again took his family with
him. We find the boy with his family at Clonmel from May to December of
1815. Here Borrow's elder brother, now a boy of fifteen, was promoted
from Ensign to Lieutenant, gaining in a year, as Dr. Knapp reminds us, a
position that it had taken his father twelve years to attain. In
January 1816 the Borrows moved to Templemore, returning to England in
May of that year. Borrow, we see, was less than a year in Ireland, and
he was only thirteen years of age when he left the country. But it seems
to have been the greatest influence that guided his career. Three of the
most fascinating chapters in _Lavengro_ were one outcome of that brief
sojourn, a thirst for the acquirement of languages was another, and
perhaps a taste for romancing a third. Borrow never came to have the
least sympathy with the Irish race, or its national aspirations. As the
son of a half-educated soldier he did not come in contact with any but
the vagabond element of Ireland, exactly as his father had done before
him.[30] Captain Borrow was asked on one occasion what language is being
spoken:

'Irish,' said my father with a loud voice, 'and a bad language
it is.... There's one part of London where all the Irish
live--at least the worst of them--and there they hatch their
villainies to speak this tongue.'

And Borrow followed his father's prejudices throughout his life,
although in the one happy year in which he wrote _The Bible in Spain_ he
was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his
work:

Honour to Ireland and her 'hundred thousand welcomes'! Her
fields have long been the greenest in the world; her daughters
the fairest; her sons the bravest and most eloquent. May they
never cease to be so.[31]

In later years Orangemen were to him the only attractive