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Given as he was to snubbing and browbeating others, Borrow was not a man to sit silent and see another man badly treated without raising hand or voice in his defence. Proof of this is found in an instructive story related by Mr. J. Ewing Ritchie in his chatty “East Anglian Reminiscences.” “One good anecdote I heard about George Borrow,” writes Mr. Ritchie. “My informant was an Independent minister, at the time supplying the pulpit at Lowestoft and staying at Oulton Hall, then inhabited by a worthy dissenting tenant. One night a meeting of the Bible Society was held at Mutford Bridge, at which the party from the Hall attended, and where George Borrow was one of the speakers. After the meeting was over, all the speakers went back to supper at Oulton Hall, and my friend among them, who, in the course of the supper, found himself violently attacked by a clergyman for holding Calvinistic opinions. Naturally my friend replied that the clergyman was bound to do the same. ‘How do you make that out?’ ‘Why, the Articles of your Church are Calvinistic, and to them you have sworn assent!’ ‘Oh yes, but there is a way of explaining them away!’ ‘How so?’ said my friend. ‘Oh,’ replied the clergyman, ‘we are not bound to take the words in their natural sense.’ My friend, an honest, blunt East Anglian, intimated that he did not understand that way of evading the difficulty; but he was then a young man and did not like to continue the discussion further. However, George Borrow, who had not said a word hitherto, entered into the discussion, opening fire on the clergyman in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point. ‘Never,’ says my friend, ‘did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.’”

Borrow was often asked by visitors to Oulton if it was his intention to leave behind him the necessary material for the compilation of a biography of his strange career. This, however, he could never be persuaded to do. He maintained that “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “The Bible in Spain,” contained all of his life that it was necessary for posterity to know. It was not the man but his works that should live, he would say, and his books contained the best part of himself. While in London, however, at the house which he took in Hereford Square, Brompton, he consented to sit for his portrait, the artist being Henry Philips. This picture afterwards passed into the possession of his step-daughter, Mrs. Henrietta MacOubrey.

Of the painting of this portrait a very good story is told. Borrow was a very bad sitter, he was ever anxious to get out into the fresh air and sunlight. Philips was greatly hindered by this restlessness, but one day he hit upon a plan which conquered the chafing child of Nature and served his own purpose admirably. He was aware of Borrow’s wonderful gift of tongues and the fascination that philological studies had for him. So he remarked, “I have always heard, Mr. Borrow, that the Persian is a very fine language; is it so?” “It is, Philips; it is,” replied “Lavengro.” “Perhaps you will not mind reciting me something in the Persian tongue?” “Dear me, no; certainly not.” And then Borrow’s face lit up with the light that Philips longed for, and he commenced declaiming at the top of his voice, while the painter made the most of his opportunity. When he found his subject was lapsing into silence, and that the old feeling of weariness and boredom was again creeping upon him, he would start him off again by saying, “I have always heard that the Turkish – or the Armenian – is a very fine language,” with a like result, until at length the portrait was completed.

The monotony of Borrow’s life at Oulton was varied by occasional visits to London and excursions into Wales and to the Isle of Man. In his travels through Wales he was accompanied by his wife and step-daughter. How the journey was brought about he explains in the first chapter of “Wild Wales,” a work which, published in 1862, was the outcome of his ramblings in the Principality. “In the summer of 1854, myself, wife and daughter, determined upon going into Wales, to pass a few months there. We are country-people of a corner of East Anglia, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had been residing so long on our own little estate that we had become tired of the objects around us, and conceived that we should be all the better for changing the scene for a short period. We were undetermined for some time with respect to where we should go. I proposed Wales from the first, but my wife and daughter, who have always had rather a hankering after what is fashionable, said they thought it would be more advisable to go to Harrogate or Leamington. On my observing that these were terrible places for expense, they replied that though the price of corn had of late been shamefully low we had a spare hundred pounds or two in our pockets and could afford to pay for a little insight into fashionable life. I told them that there was nothing I so much hated as fashionable life, but that, as I was anything but a selfish person, I would endeavour to stifle my abhorrence of it for a time and attend them either to Leamington or Harrogate. By this speech I obtained my wish, even as I knew I should, for my wife and daughter instantly observed that, after all, they thought we had better go into Wales, which, though not so fashionable as either Leamington or Harrogate, was a very picturesque country, where they had no doubt they should get on very well, more especially as I was acquainted with the Welsh language.”

This is Borrow’s account of how he obtained his own way; it would have been interesting had his wife and step-daughter also recorded their version of the affair.

Borrow’s mother, who had given up her house in Willow Lane, died at Oulton, in 1860. The same year Borrow published a small volume, entitled “The Sleeping Bard,” a translation from the Welsh of Elis Wyn. During the years 1862–3 various translations of his appeared in Once a Week, a magazine that then numbered amongst its contributors such writers as Harriet Martineau and S. Baring-Gould, and artists as Leech, Keene, Tenniel, Millais and Du Maurier. Amongst these translations were “The Hailstorm, or the Death of Bui,” from the ancient Norse; “The Count of Vendal’s Daughter,” from the ancient Danish; “Harald Harfagr,” from the Norse; “Emelian the Fool,” and “The Story of Yashka with the Bear’s Ear,” from the Russian; and several ballads from the Manx. Other translations from the Danish of Oehlenschlaeger are still in the possession of Mrs. MacOubrey, and have never been printed. His last book, “The Romano Lavo-Lil,” was issued in 1872.

Between 1860 and 1870, Borrow spent a good deal of his time in London, at his house in Hereford Square. This was mainly on account of the ill-health of his wife, who died there in 1869, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery. After her death, however, he returned to Oulton, telling Mr. Watts that he was going down into East Anglia to die.

From that time his life was lived more apart from the world than ever. His visitors were few; and fewer still were the visits he paid to others. During his latter years his tall, erect, somewhat mysterious figure was often seen in the early hours of summer mornings or late at night on the lonely pathways that wind in and out from the banks of Oulton Broad. He loved to be mysterious, and the village children used to hush their voices and draw aside at his approach. They looked upon him with fear and awe – for had they not seen him stop and talk with the gipsies, who ran away with little children? But in his heart, Borrow was fond of the little ones, though it amused him to watch the impression his strange personality made upon them. Older people he seldom spoke to when out on his solitary rambles; but sometimes he would flash out such a glance from beneath his broad-brimmed hat and shaggy eyebrows as would make timid country-folk hasten on their way filled with vague thoughts and fears of the evil eye. Mr. John Murray has referred to this love of mystery on the part of his father’s friend, and also to his moody and variable temperament; while Mr. G. T. Bettany has related how he enjoyed creating a sensation by riding about on a fine Arab horse which he brought home with him from Turkey in 1844.

Still Borrow was not unpopular with the villagers, many of whom, long after his death, remembered little acts of kindness on his part by which they had benefited. To the sick and infirm he was always a good friend, though his almost invariable remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to were wine and ale. He was exceedingly fond of animals, and nothing aroused his wrath more than to see them badly treated. On one occasion, while out walking not far from his home, he encountered some men who were ill-using a fallen horse. He remonstrated with them, and his words, backed by his commanding figure, prevailed upon them to desist from their cruelty. He then sent one of them for a bowl of ale. When it was brought, he knelt down on the road beside the exhausted animal, and poured it down its throat. Having afterwards assisted the men in getting the horse upon its feet, he left them, but not before he had given them a severe lecture on the treatment of dumb animals in general and fallen horses in particular.

At another time, a favourite old cat that was ill, crawled out of his house to die in the garden hedge. Borrow no sooner missed the poor creature than he went in search of it, and brought it indoors in his arms. He then laid it down in a comfortable spot, and sat and watched it till it was dead.

Owing to the somewhat eccentric manner in which he passed his latter days, there were some persons who assumed after his death that in his declining years he lacked the attention of friends, and the little comforts and considerations that are due to old age. Yet this was not so; if the world heard little of him from the time of his final retirement into rural seclusion, and lost sight of him and believed him dead, it was his own choosing that they should remain in ignorance. He had had his day, a longer and fuller one than falls to the lot of most of the sons of men, and, when the weight of years began to tell upon him, he chose to live out the little time that was left to him amidst such scenes as were in harmony with his nature. He died at Oulton on July 26, 1881, just three weeks after the completion of his seventy-eighth year. His step-daughter, Mrs. MacOubrey, the Henrietta of “Wild Wales,” who had a sincere affection for him, was his constant attendant during his last illness, and was with him at the end. He was buried at Brompton Cemetery, where his body lies beside that of his wife. Not long after his death, his Oulton home was pulled down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the old summer-house in which he loved to linger, and the ragged fir-trees that sighed the requiem of his last hours.

CHAPTER VI: BORROW AND PUGILISM

During the first quarter of the present century pugilism was rampant in the Eastern Counties of England. A pugilistic encounter was then looked upon as an affair of national interest, and people came in their thousands from far and near to witness it. The Norwich neighbourhood was noted for its prize-fights, and Borrow had the names of all the champions at his tongue’s end. Cobbett, Cribb, Belcher, Tom Spring of Bedford, Black Richmond, Irish Randall – he was acquainted with the records of them all, as well as with those of the leading fighting-men amongst the gipsies. They were to him the leaders of the old spirit of English aggressiveness, and as such he revered them. His pen was always ready to defend a straightforward bruiser, with whom, he contended, the Roman gladiator and the Spanish bull-fighter were not to be compared. He, himself, was no mean student of the art of self-defence, and there is some ground for believing that the scene between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinman, in which the burly tinker succumbs to the former’s prowess after a warm encounter in the Mumpers’ Dingle, is founded upon an event which occurred during Borrow’s wayward progress through rural England.

On the publication of “Lavengro,” Borrow’s evident partiality for the pugilists of his day brought down upon him a torrent of criticism and condemnation. Who, it was asked, but a man of coarse instincts could have found pleasure in mingling with brutal fighting-men and describing their desperate exploits? The writer of a work who went out of his way to drag in such characters and scenes as these could be little better than a barbarian!

Borrow was not a man to sit down quietly under such attacks as these; he waited his opportunity, and then had his fling. At the end of “The Romany Rye,” there appeared an Appendix, in which the author set himself the task of smashing his critics. This same Appendix is an amazing piece of writing; in it Borrow slashes right and left as might a gallant swordsman who found himself alone in the midst of a mob bent on his destruction. Mr. Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things that Borrovians would be loth to lose.

Borrow’s defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims defiantly, “Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever one of the English aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by rushing up the stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret, and rescuing a woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer says no. A woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, who ran up the burning stairs.” And so he goes on, overwhelming his opponents with a tornado of generalities that have nothing whatever to do with prize-fighting, and yet how delightful it all is!

There were other critics – Borrow always had plenty of critics – who found it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his denunciation in one passage of “those disgraceful and brutalising exhibitions called pugilistic combats.” The explanation has been suggested that for once the “John Bull” Borrow, with his patriotic exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It would be hard to find a writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a man of “moods” that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do not tally with a superhuman exactitude.

But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he drank on his Welsh rambles – and has not “Wild Wales” been called “The Epic of Ale?” – or his associations with the great fighting-men of his day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the men. “Why should I hide the truth?” he asks, when telling of his presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near Norwich. Thurtell, whose boast it was that he had introduced bruising into East Anglia, had arranged the fight, which was ever after memorable to Borrow for the appearance on the scene of Gipsy Will and his celebrated gang. This well-known Romany, who was afterwards hanged outside the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds for a murder committed in his youth, was a sturdy, muscular fellow, six feet in height, who rendered himself especially noticeable by wearing a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian hat. He was anxious on this occasion to fight the best man in England for twenty pounds (not a very tempting sum in the light of our more advanced days); but no one accepted the challenge, though a young countryman was anxious to do so until assured by his friends that the notorious gipsy would certainly kill him.

Borrow has gone out of his way in “The Gipsies of Spain” to give a full description of this Gipsy Will and his notable companions. At the risk of wearying some readers who deprecate the prize-ring and its cosmopolitan environment, the writer quotes something of this description, as it appears in one of the less known of Borrow’s works:

“Some time before the commencement of the combat, three men, mounted on wild-looking horses came dashing down the road in the direction of the meadow, in the midst of which they presently showed themselves, their horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful alacrity. ‘That’s Gipsy Will and his gang,’ lisped a Hebrew pickpocket; ‘we shall have another fight.’ The word gipsy was always sufficient to excite my curiosity, and I looked attentively at the new-comers.

“I have seen gipsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish; and I have also seen the legitimate children of most countries of the world; but I never saw, upon the whole, three more remarkable individuals, as far as personal appearance was concerned, than the three English gipsies who now presented themselves to my eyes on that spot. Two of them had dismounted, and were holding their horses by the reins. The tallest, and, at the first glance, the most (!) interesting of the two, was almost a giant, for his height could not have been less than six feet three. It is impossible for the imagination to conceive anything more perfectly beautiful than were the features of this man, and the most skilful sculptor of Greece might have taken them as his model for a hero and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty, a rare thing in a gipsy; the nose less Roman than Grecian, fine, yet delicate; the eyes large, overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy expression; it was only when the lashes were elevated that the gipsy glance was seen, if that can be called a glance which is a strange stare, like nothing else in the world. His complexion was a beautiful olive; and his teeth were of a brilliancy uncommon even among these people, who have all fine teeth. He was dressed in a coarse waggoner’s slop, which, however, was unable to conceal altogether the proportions of his noble and Herculean figure. He might be about twenty-eight. His companion and his captain, Gipsy Will, was, I think, fifty, when he was hanged ten years subsequently. I have still present before me his bushy black hair, his black face, and his big black eyes, fixed and staring. His dress consisted of a loose blue jockey coat, jockey boots and breeches; in his hand was a huge jockey whip, and on his head (it struck me at the time for its singularity) a broad-brimmed, high-peaked, Andalusian hat, or at least one very much resembling those generally worn in that province. In stature he was shorter than his more youthful companion, yet he must have measured six feet at least, and was stronger built, if possible. What brawn! what bone! what legs! what thighs! The third gipsy, who remained on horseback, looked more like a phantom than anything human. His complexion was the colour of pale dust, and of that same colour was all that pertained to him, hat and clothes. His boots were dusty, of course, and his very horse was of a dusty dun. His features were whimsically ugly, most of his teeth were gone, and as to his age, he might be thirty or sixty. He was somewhat lame and halt; but an unequalled rider when once upon his steed, which he was naturally not very solicitous to quit. I subsequently discovered that he was considered the wizard of the gang.”