shed he
resided in Paris until his death.

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN BORROW OF THE WEST NORFOLK MILITIA

George Henry Borrow was born at Dumpling Green near East Dereham,
Norfolk, on the 5th of July 1803. It pleased him to state on many an
occasion that he was born at East Dereham.

On an evening of July, in the year 18--, at East D----, a
beautiful little town in a certain district of East Anglia, I
first saw the light,

he writes in the opening lines of _Lavengro_, using almost the identical
phraseology that we find in the opening lines of Goethe's _Wahrheit und
Dichtung_. Here is a later memory of Dereham from _Lavengro_:

What it is at present I know not, for thirty years and more
have elapsed since I last trod its streets. It will scarcely
have improved, for how could it be better than it was? I love
to think on thee, pretty, quiet D----, thou pattern of an
English country town, with thy clean but narrow streets
branching out from thy modest market-place, with their
old-fashioned houses, with here and there a roof of venerable
thatch, with thy one half-aristocratic mansion, where resided
the Lady Bountiful--she, the generous and kind, who loved to
visit the sick, leaning on her golden-headed cane, while the
sleek old footman walked at a respectful distance behind.
Pretty, quiet D----, with thy venerable church, in which
moulder the mortal remains of England's sweetest and most pious
bard.

Then follows an exquisite eulogy of the poet Cowper, which readers of
_Lavengro_ know full well. Three years before Borrow was born William
Cowper died in this very town, leaving behind him so rich a legacy of
poetry and of prose, and moreover so fragrant a memory of a life in
which humour and pathos played an equal part. It was no small thing for
a youth who aspired to any kind of renown to be born in the
neighbourhood of the last resting-place of the author of _The Task_.

Yet Borrow was not actually born in East Dereham, but a mile and a half
away, at the little hamlet of Dumpling Green, in what was then a
glorious wilderness of common and furze bush, but is now a quiet
landscape of fields and hedges. You will find the home in which the
author of _Lavengro_ first saw the light without much difficulty. It is
a fair-sized farm-house, with a long low frontage separated from the
road by a considerable strip of garden. It suggests a pro