To Mrs. George Borrow, 39 Camperdown Terrace,
Yarmouth

(Fragment? undated.)

On Tuesday I am going through the whole of it to Icolmkill—I should start to-morrow—but I must get my shoes new soles, for they have been torn to pieces by the roads, and likewise some of my things mended, for they are in a sad condition.

I shall return from Thurso to Inverness, as I shall want some more money to bring me home.  So pray do not let the credit be withdrawn.  What a blessing it is to have money, but how cautious people ought to be not to waste it.  Pray remember me most kindly to our good friend Mr. Hills.  Send the Harveys the pheasant as usual with my kind regards.  I think you should write to Mr. Dalton of Bury telling him that I have been unwell, and that I send my kind regards and respects to him.  I send dear Hen a paper in company with this, in which I have enclosed specimens of the heather, the moss and the fern, or “raineach,” of Mull.—God bless you both.

George Borrow.

Do not delay in sending the order.  Write at the same time telling me how you are.

In spite of Borrow’s vow never to visit Scotland again, he was there eight years later—in 1866—but only in the Lowlands.  His stepdaughter, Hen., or Henrietta Clarke, had married Dr. MacOubrey, of Belfast, and Borrow and his wife went on a visit to the pair.  But the incorrigible vagabond in Borrow was forced to declare itself, and leaving his wife and daughter in Belfast he crossed to Stranraer by steamer on 17th July, 1866, and tramped through the lowlands, visiting Ecclefechan and Gretna Green.  We have no record of his experiences at these places.  The only literary impression of the Scots tour of 1866, apart from a brief reference in Dr. Knapp’s Life, is an essay on Kirk Yetholm in Romano Lavo-Lil.  We would gladly have exchanged it for an account of his visits to Abbotsford and Melrose, two places which he saw in August of this year.

In his letter of 27th November from Kirkwall it will be seen that Borrow records the kindness received from “a young gentleman of the name of Petrie.”  It is pleasant to find that when he returned to England he did not forget that kindness, as the next letter demonstrates:

On the same day that Borrow wrote, Mr. Petrie sent his acknowledgment of the books, and so the letters crossed:

My last glimpse of George Borrow in Scotland during his memorable trip of the winter of 1858 is contained in a letter that I received some time ago from the Rev. J. Wilcock of St. Ringan’s Manse, Lerwick, which runs as follows:

Nov. 18th, 1903.

Dear Sir,—As I see that you are interested in George Borrow, would you allow me to supply you with a little notice of him which has not appeared in print?  A friend here—need I explain that this is written from the capital of the Shetlands?—a friend, I say, now dead, told me that one day early in the forenoon, during the winter, he had walked out from the town for a stroll into the country.  About a mile out from the town is a piece of water called the Loch of Clickimin, on a peninsula, in which is an ancient (so-called) “Pictish Castle.”  His attention was attracted by a tall, burly stranger, who was surveying this ancient relic with deep interest.  As the water of the loch was well up about the castle, converting the plot of ground on which it stood almost altogether into an island, the stranger took off shoes and stockings and trousers, and waded all round the building in order to get a thorough view of it.  This procedure was all the more remarkable from the fact, as above mentioned, that the season was winter.  I believe that there was snow on the ground at the time.  My friend noticed on meeting him again in the course of the same walk that he was very lightly clothed.  He had on a cotton shirt, a loose open jacket, and on the whole was evidently indifferent to the rigour of our northern climate at that time of the year.

All Irishmen who wish their country to preserve its individuality should have a kindly feeling for George Borrow.  Opposed as he was to the majority of the people in religion and in politics, he was about the only Englishman of his time who took an interest in their national literature, language and folk-lore.  Had he written such another travel book about Ireland as he wrote about Wales he would certainly have added to the sum of human pleasure.

I find only one letter to his wife during this Irish journey:

To Mrs. George Borrow

Ballina, County Mayo, Thursday Morning.

My dear Carreta,—I write to you a few lines.  I have now walked 270 miles, and have passed through Leinster and Connaught.  I have suffered a good deal of hardship, for this is a very different country to walk in from England.  The food is bad and does not agree with me.  I shall be glad to get back, but first of all I wish to walk to the Causeway.  As soon as I have done that I shall get on railroad and return, as I find there is a railroad from Londonderry to Dublin.  Pray direct to me at Post Office, Londonderry.  I have at present about seven pounds remaining, perhaps it would bring me back to Dublin; however, to prevent accidents, have the kindness to enclose me an order on the Post Office, Londonderry, for five pounds.  I expect to be there next Monday, and to be home by the end of the week.  Glad enough I shall be to get back to you and Hen.  I got your letter at Galway.  What you said about poor Flora was comforting—pray take care of her.  Don’t forget the order.  I hope to write in a day or two a kind of duplicate of this.  I send Hen. heath from Connemara, and also seaweed from a bay of the Atlantic.  I have walked across Ireland; the country people are civil; but I believe all classes are disposed to join the French.  The idolatry and popery are beyond conception.  God bless you, dearest.

George Borrow.

Love to Hen. and poor Flora.  (Keep this.)

George Borrow’s three most important books had all a very interesting history.  We have seen the processes by which The Bible in Spain was built up from note-books and letters.  We have seen further the most curious apprenticeship by which Lavengro came into existence.  The most distinctly English book—at least in a certain absence of cosmopolitanism—that Victorian literature produced was to a great extent written on scraps of paper during a prolonged Continental tour which included Constantinople and Budapest.  In Lavengro we have only half a book, the whole work, which included what came to be published as The Romany Rye, having been intended to appear in four volumes.  The first volume was written in 1843, the second in 1845, after the Continental tour, which is made use of in the description of the Hungarian, and the third volume in the years between 1845 and 1848.  Then in 1852 Borrow wrote out an “advertisement” of a fourth volume, which runs as follows:

Shortly will be published in one volume.  Price 10s.  The Rommany Rye, Being the fourth volume of Lavengro.  By George Borrow, author of The Bible in Spain.

But this volume did not make an appearance “shortly.”  Its author was far too much offended with the critics, too disheartened it may be to care to offer himself again for their gibes.  The years rolled on, much of the time being spent at Yarmouth, a little of it at Oulton.  There was a visit to Cornwall in 1854, and another to Wales in the same year.  The Isle of Man was selected for a holiday in 1855, and not until 1857 did The Romany Rye appear.  The book was now in two volumes, and we see that the word Romany had dropped an “m”:

We are introduced once more to many old favourites, to Petulengro, to the Man in Black, and above all to Isopel Berners.  The incidents of Lavengro are supposed to have taken place between the 24th May, 1825, and the 18th July of that year.  In The Romany Rye the incidents apparently occur between 19th July and 3rd August, 1825.  In the opinion of that most eminent of gypsy experts, Mr. John Sampson, the whole of the episodes in the five volumes occurred in seventy-two days.  Mr. Sampson agrees with Dr. Knapp in locating Mumper’s Dingle in Momber or Monmer Lane, Willenhall, Shropshire.  The dingle has disappeared—it is now occupied by the Monmer Lane Ironworks—but you may still find Dingle Bridge and Dingle Lane.  The book has added to the glamour of gypsydom, and to the interest in the gypsies which we all derive from Lavengro, but Mr. Sampson makes short work of Borrow’s gypsy learning on its philological side.  “No gypsy,” he says, “ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.”  “Borrow’s genders are perversely incorrect”; and “Romany”—a word which can never get out of our language, let philologists say what they will—should have been “Romani.”  “‘Haarsträubend’ is the fitting epithet,” says Mr. Sampson, “which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow’s etymologies.”  But all this is very unimportant, and the book remains in the whole of its forty-seven chapters not one whit less a joy to us than does its predecessor Lavengro, with its visions of gypsies and highwaymen and boxers.

During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth.  The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.

But all this is a digression from the progress of our narrative of the advent of The Romany Rye.  The book was published in an edition of 1000 copies in April, 1857, and it took thirty years to dispose of 3750 copies.  Not more than 2000 copies of his book were sold in Great Britain during the twenty-three remaining years of Borrow’s life.  What wonder that he was embittered by his failure!  The reviews were far from favourable, although Mr. Elwin wrote not unkindly in an article in the Quarterly Review called “Roving Life in England.”  No critic, however, was as severe as The Athenæum, which had called Lavengro “balderdash” and referred to The Romany Rye as the “literary dough” of an author “whose dullest gypsy preparation we have now read.”  In later years, when, alas! it was too late, The Athenæum, through the eloquent pen of Theodore Watts, made good amends.  But William Bodham Donne wrote to Borrow with adequate enthusiasm:

And perhaps a letter from the then Town Clerk of Oxford is worth reproducing here:

To George Borrow, Esq.

Town Clerk’s Office, Oxford, 19th August 1857.

Sir,—We have, attached to our Corporation, an ancient jocular court composed of 13 of the poor old freemen who attend the elections and have a king who sits attired in scarlet with a crown and sentences interlopers (non-freemen) to be cold-burned, i.e. a bucket or so of water introduced to the offender’s sleeve by means of the city pump; but this infliction is of course generally commuted by a small pecuniary compensation.

They call themselves “Slaveonians” or “Sclavonians.”  The only notice we have of them in the city records is by the name of “Slovens Hall.”  Reading Romany Rye I notice your account of the Sclaves and venture to trouble you with this, and to enquire whether you think that the Sclaves might be connected through the Saxons with the ancient municipal institutions of this country.  You are no doubt aware that Oxford is one of the most ancient Saxon towns, being a royal bailiwick and fortified before the Conquest,—Yours truly,

George P. Hester.

In spite of contemporary criticism, The Romany Rye is a great book, or rather it contains the concluding chapters of a great book.  Sequels are usually proclaimed to be inferior to their predecessors.  But The Romany Rye is not a sequel.  It is part of Lavengro, and is therefore Borrow’s most imperishable monument.

I was with Borrow a week ago at Donne’s, and also at Yarmouth three months ago: he is well, but not yet agreed with Murray.  He read me a long translation he had made from the Turkish: which I could not admire, and his taste becomes stranger than ever.

But Borrow’s genius if not his taste was always admired by FitzGerald, as the following letter among my Borrow Papers clearly indicates.  Borrow had published The Romany Rye at the beginning of May:

Within hail almost lives George Borrow, who has lately published, and given me, two new volumes of Lavengro called Romany Rye, with some excellent things, and some very bad (as I have made bold to write to him—how shall I face him!)  You would not like the book at all I think.

It was Cowell, it will be remembered, who introduced FitzGerald to the Persian poet Omar, and afterwards regretted the act.  The first edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám appeared two years later, in 1859.  Edward Byles Cowell was born in Ipswich in 1826, and he was educated at the Ipswich Grammar School.  It was in the library attached to the Ipswich Library Institution that Cowell commenced the study of Oriental languages.  In 1842 he entered the business of his father and grandfather as a merchant and maltster.  When only twenty years of age he commenced his friendship with Edward FitzGerald, and their correspondence may be found in Dr. Aldis Wright’s FitzGerald Correspondence.  In 1850 he left his brother to carry on the business and entered himself at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he passed six years.  At intervals he read Greek with FitzGerald and, later, Persian.  FitzGerald commenced to learn this last language, which was to bring him fame, when he was forty-four years of age.  In 1856 Cowell was appointed to a Professorship of English History at Calcutta, and from there he sent FitzGerald a copy of the manuscript of Omar Khayyám, afterwards lent by FitzGerald to Borrow.  Much earlier than this—in 1853—FitzGerald had written to Borrow:

At Ipswich, indeed, is a man whom you would like to know, I think, and who would like to know you; one Edward Cowell: a great scholar, if I may judge. . . .  Should you go to Ipswich do look for him! a great deal more worth looking for (I speak with no sham modesty, I am sure) than yours,—E. F. G.

Twenty-six years afterwards—in 1879—we find FitzGerald writing to Dr. Aldis Wright to the effect that Cowell had been seized with “a wish to learn Welsh under George Borrow”:

There is one short letter from FitzGerald to Borrow in Dr. Aldis Wright’s FitzGerald Letters.  It is dated June, 1857, and from it we learn that FitzGerald lent Borrow the Calcutta manuscript of Omar Khayyám, upon which he based his own immortal translation, and from a letter to W. H. Thompson in 1861 we learn that Cowell, who had inspired the writing of FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám, Donne and Borrow were the only three friends to whom he had sent copies of his “peccadilloes in verse” as he calls his remarkable translation, and this two years after it was published.  A letter, dated July 6, 1857, asks for the return of FitzGerald’s copy of the Ouseley manuscript of Omar Khayyám, Borrow having clearly already returned the Calcutta manuscript.  This letter concludes on a pathetic note:

My old Parson Crabbe is bowing down under epileptic fits, or something like, and I believe his brave old white head will soon sink into the village church sward.  Why, our time seems coming.  Make way, gentlemen!

Borrow comes more than once into the story of FitzGerald’s great translation of Omar Khayyám, which in our day has caused so great a sensation, and deserves all the enthusiasm that it has excited as the

“. . . golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well,”

The next two letters by FitzGerald from my Borrow Papers are of the year 1859, the year of the first publication of the Rubáiyát:

To George Borrow, Esq.

10 Marine Parade, Lowestoft.

My dear Borrow,—I have come here with three nieces to give them sea air and change.  They are all perfectly quiet, sensible, and unpretentious girls; so as, if you will come over here any day or days, we will find you board and bed too, for a week longer at any rate.  There is a good room below, which we now only use for meals, but which you and I can be quite at our sole ease in.  Won’t you come?

I purpose (and indeed have been some while intentioning) to go over to Yarmouth to look for you.  But I write this note in hope it may bring you hither also.

Donne has got his soldier boy home from India—Freddy—I always thought him a very nice fellow indeed.  No doubt life is happy enough to all of them just now.  Donne has been on a visit to the Highlands—which seems to have pleased him—I have got an MS. of Bahram and his Seven Castles (Persian), which I have not yet cared to look far into.  Will you?  It is short, fairly transcribed, and of some repute in its own country, I hear.  Cowell sent it me from Calcutta; but it almost requires his company to make one devote one’s time to Persian, when, with what remains of one’s old English eyes, one can read the Odyssey and Shakespeare.

With compliments to the ladies, believe me, Yours very truly,

Edward FitzGerald.

I didn’t know you were back from your usual summer tour till Mr. Cobb told my sister lately of having seen you.