strange notions and doctrines"--especially the
doctrine that everyone has a right to dispose as he thinks best of that
which is his own, even of his life--which he had imbibed from Taylor.
Taylor was "fond of getting hold of young men and, according to orthodox
accounts, doing them a deal of harm." {71a} His views, says Dr. Knapp,
sank deep "into the organism of his pupil," and "would only be
eradicated, if at all, through much suffering." Dr. Knapp thought that
the execution of Thurtell ought to have produced a "favourable change in
his mode of thinking"--as if prize fighting and murder were not far more
common among Christians than atheists. But if Borrow had never met
Taylor he would have met someone else, atheist or religious enthusiast,
who would have lured him from the straight, smooth, flowery path of
orthodoxy; otherwise he might have been a clergyman or he might have been
Dr. Knapp, but he would not have been George Borrow. "What is truth?" he
asked. "Would that I had never been born!" he said to himself. And it
was an open air ranter, not a clergyman or unobtrusive godly man, that
made him exclaim: "Would that my life had been like his--even like that
man's." Then the Gypsy reminded him of "the wind on the heath" and the
boxing gloves.

When his father asked Borrow what he proposed to do, {71b} seeing that he
was likely to do nothing at law, he had nothing to suggest. Southey
apparently could not help him to the Foreign Office. The only opening
that can have seemed possible to him was literature. He might, for
example, produce a volume of translations like the "Specimen of Russian
Poets" (1820) of John Bowring, whom he met at Taylor's. Bowring, a man
of twenty-nine in 1821, was the head of a commercial firm and afterwards
a friend of Borrow and the author of many translations from Russian,
Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Servian, Hungarian and Bohemian song. He was, as
the "Old Radical" of "The Romany Rye," Borrow's victim in his lifetime,
and after his death the victim of Dr. Knapp as the supposed false friend
of his hero. The mud thrown at him had long since dried, and has now
been brushed off in a satisfactory manner by Mr. R. A. J. Walling. {72}

{picture: Tom Shelton, Jack Randall: page72.jpg}

CHAPTER XI--LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES

When Borrow was in his nineteenth year--according to Dr. Knapp's
estimate--he told his father what he had done: "I have learned Welsh, and
have translated the s