The truth is that Borrow was exceedingly fond of children. He appealed strongly to them. No such impression as he made upon the Elwin children at Booton, upon the boys of Dr. Gordon Hake’s family at Bury, upon the Cornish children he encountered in 1854 (p. 170), was ever made by a man who did not understand children and sympathise with them.
The chronicle to the end of 1853 may be very briefly recounted. Borrow’s mother had been persuaded in 1849 to leave the house in Willow Lane, Norwich, where she had lived alone ever since his departure for St. Petersburg, and take up her quarters with the family at Oulton. In the midst of the writing of “The Romany Rye” in 1853, Dr. Hake ordered Borrow’s wife not to remain at Oulton during the coming winter. Borrow himself welcomed the prospect of a change, and in August he and the three women of his household removed to Yarmouth, where they lived in lodgings for seven years, except when they were engaged in the excursions which he presently organised in various parts of the United Kingdom.
Borrow’s only journey to the land of mystery and legend from which his family sprang was made in 1853. It came about curiously. An incident occurred, soon after he had taken up his residence in lodgings at Yarmouth, which demonstrated both his personal courage and the easy terms on which he always was with the water. [146] In the midst of a terrible storm he dashed into the sea, himself saved one life from an overturned boat, and assisted to rescue the rest of the people in danger. He became the local hero of the hour, and an account of his gallantry was printed in the Bury Post.
The Borrows of Cornwall had been mainly a home-keeping race. The connection of George’s branch with the parent stem had been completely severed half a century before, and the inhabitants of the Caradon Hills had altogether lost sight of old Tom Borrow and his life. Now, however, the Plymouth Mail reprinted from the Bury paper a paragraph about the Yarmouth affair, and in process of time it was read at St. Cleer. The appearance of a person by the name of Borrow in this heroic shape was discussed with curiosity. Putting two and two together, the Cornishmen came to the conclusion that this celebrated author and saviour of drowning men could be none other than the son of that Tom Borrow whose claim to fame among them was that he had knocked down the headborough at Menheniot Fair.
Many of the name were in the district. Henry Borrow, of Looe Down, was a son of another Henry, George’s uncle, and therefore a cousin of the Romany Rye. Henry had a daughter, Ann, married to Mr. Robert Taylor, of Penquite, a person of some consideration in the locality. The upshot of the discussion was that Mr. Taylor was requisitioned by the rest of the family to invite the celebrity to Cornwall. In a letter of acceptance, Borrow expressed the pleasure it gave him to receive such an invitation, and the delight he felt in knowing that there were still some who remembered his honoured father, who, he said, had as true a Cornish heart as ever beat.
Thus he spent the Christmas of 1853 in the county of which he was in the truest sense native; and of this atmosphere, most genial to him, he breathed eagerly. Borrow never accomplished the book he proposed to write about Cornwall. An advertisement of it was published at the end of “The Romany Rye,” when he was fresh home from his visit and full of the romance he had absorbed in the westernmost peninsula of England. But, like many of his plans, it failed to come to anything. If it had been written, it would probably have been as full of good things as his Welsh book, and a better whole, since it was a smaller and more manageable subject. It will be possible presently to attempt to indicate the kind of work this might have been.
He left Yarmouth on December 23rd, and, this time not disdaining the services of the detested railway, was able to reach Plymouth at midnight. In that day Plymouth was the western terminus of the railway system. Brunel’s great bridge, which carries the iron road at a dizzy altitude across the Tamar from Devonshire into Cornwall, was not raised till six years later, and people who adventured into the land of giants and saints, pilchards and pasties, must complete their journey by coach. Having slept a night at the Royal Hotel in Plymouth, Borrow found that the Christmas traffic had crowded the coach, and he arrived at the Borrovian determination to walk to Liskeard, on the main road eighteen miles away, the nearest town to his objective among the hills. Leaving his luggage to be carried on by the mail, he “threw his cloak on his arm (a very old friend which had seen some thirty years’ service, the constant companion of his travels”), and trudged off to Devonport, across the Tamar by the ferry, and along the enchanting sylvan highway to the town whose representative in Parliament was just then laying about the “Puseyites” in a fashion most agreeable to Borrow.
There was a little stir in the bookish circles of the old Cornish borough among whom Mr. Taylor had spread the news that Borrow was coming, and a small party assembled to meet him and lionise him. These were drawn up under the porch of Webb’s Hotel as the huge figure strode into view. There was the ex-Mayor, Mr. Bernard Anstis. There was the Town Clerk, Mr. James Jago, a connection of the Borrows by marriage. There were his own relations. Happily, under these new auspices, he dropped his affectation of objection to be lionised, and took wine with his worshippers at the hotel in quite a conventional manner. Then, after tea with the Jago family, he and Taylor mounted horseback and rode off to Penquite, four miles away, to spend an old-style rural Christmas. “A hospitable reception, with a log on the fire” was Borrow’s own word for it—a brief but hearty tribute to the effect it had upon him. On Christmas Day he walked from Penquite to St. Cleer Church, about which his notebooks mention that it lacked an organ (as it does to this day), but that there was a fiddler in the gallery. Returning over the noble expanse of St. Cleer Down, he was introduced to a family of relations by marriage—the Pollards—and in the afternoon walked to their residence at Woolston to have lively talk of travel with two sons who had been in Australia, and to discuss the prehistoric memorials of the district, which he describes as “Druid stones.” All the Borrows have left St. Cleer, but the Pollards are in possession of Penquite.
It may seem that one lingers over the details of a visit which was but a small incident in Borrow’s life. The excuse must be offered that, if one could but penetrate the mystery of what may be called the Spirit of Old Cornwall, one would be in possession of the key to much that is mysterious in Borrow. He had inherited it fully, and it shaped many of his most pronounced characteristics. Here, if anywhere and at any time, he was at home—far more at home than his father had ever been; what freak of atavism may not account for that? Where eyes look out upon a world of wonder and of miracle, where even yet magic and supernatural intervention have their sway in that world’s affairs, and there is an underworld of faery, where strange Celtic words are of common use and wont, the philological, legend-loving wanderer was in a fitting atmosphere.
Not many people remain in Cornwall now who can remember Borrow, but a few years ago I found memories of the man and his eccentricities still lively among old inhabitants. Borrow amazed them not only by his personal peculiarities, but by his intellectual superiority to “they Borrowses.” There were many Borrows round about, small farmers, excellent and worthy undistinguished people, the friends and equals of their neighbours; the staggering fact was that such a wonder, such a celebrity, such a walking encyclopædia of information on matters of which they had never heard, should have sprung from the Borrow stock. His “curious ways” were subject of remark, but his popularity rose superior to his manners: in a few short weeks he obtained a reputation for liveliness hardly second to that of his father.
I have been told that he roamed the Caradons in all weathers without a hat, in search of sport and specimens, antiquities and dialects. He often carried a gun. If a bird that fell to him dropped in a moorland pool, he would plunge in after it and come out dripping water and beaming triumph. Little parties he attended at Penquite, at the vicarage, at the houses of friends in Liskeard, were
“. . . As merry
As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome
Can make good people.”
He himself kept the fireside circle roaring with his constant flow of gypsy songs and stories. But it was an essential point that the parties should not be genteel. “Lavengro” had not long been written, and he was then engaged upon its sequel. Shortly he was to be writing—if it were not already written—that chapter of the Appendix on “gentility-nonsense.” It was, in fact, just the zenith of the anti-gentility campaign. Once he went from Penquite into Liskeard to dine with Mr. Bernard Anstis. The despiteful demon seized him at the ex-Mayor’s hospitable board. Gentility showed its cloven hoof in some form or other; in the midst of dinner Borrow protested silently against the apparition by keeping his handkerchief in his pocket and dragging out for ostentatious use the old, greasy, rust-stained, powder-grimed rag he kept about him for cleaning his gun during expeditions on the moors. He seemed, said one, now departed (John Abraham, of Liskeard), who related to me this story, to be “perpetually repeating to himself old Burton’s maxim that ‘of all vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest.’ Yet he was proud of the fact that his father derived from what he called the Cornish ‘gentillâtre.’” Mr. Taylor was a member of a card club in Liskeard, to which belonged the doctors and lawyers and other professional gentlemen of the town. Borrow was taken in to play cards with them. But it was far too tame for him. While they settled down to their rubber, he stole out to explore the back slums of the town, “picking up all the disreputable characters he could find, working off his knowledge of ‘cant’ on them, and getting out of them what he could.”
Borrow met at St. Cleer a kindred spirit in the vicar, Berkeley. This was an Irishman of the North—not to put too fine a point on it, an Orangeman,—a man of some pretensions to learning and a great “original,” as they might say in Cornwall. Berkeley’s militant Protestantism was quite as fierce as Borrow’s. But for a certain Irish cob, as he tells us, Borrow might have become a mere philologist. It was in Ireland that he first developed the taste for petty adventure which he now indulged to the full in the wilds of Cornwall. Here was common ground. Berkeley piled coals on the fire of his anti-Papist enthusiasm. The good vicar was, withal, convivial in disposition, exiled among a people cloaking their essential kindness under a serious demeanour, and exceedingly abstemious. He was open-hearted and open-handed when he had money, which was not always. He suffered once at the hands of ruthless bailiffs. As a burning Protestant, he was on amicable terms with the Dissenters, who formed the majority of his parishioners in Methodist Cornwall; he was a bitter enemy of Ritualism, and “Popery” was his bête noire. This piquant personality presided over the destinies of the parish of St. Cleer at a time when the fortunes of the Church of England reached their lowest ebb in Cornwall, and the Methodist societies flourished like the green bay-tree. It is related that for a considerable time the only regular attendant at church, in addition to the parson, was a schoolmaster of episcopal sympathies, who walked a mile and a half of a Sunday morning to hear Berkeley’s denunciation of the Papists echoing through an empty building.
Berkeley was one of those Irish Protestants to whom Borrow had paid tribute as a “most remarkable body of men who during two centuries have fought a good fight in Ireland in the cause of civilisation and religious truth . . . where . . . though surrounded with difficulties of every kind, they have maintained their ground; amidst darkness they have held up a lamp, and it would be well for Ireland were all her children like these, her adopted ones.” This is highly controversial ground, upon which there is no need to enter, save for the purpose of remarking that the man who had recently written that was like to be a friendly soul to Berkeley. And during his stay in Cornwall he was frequently at the vicarage. He would, as Berkeley related to Dr. Knapp in the character-sketch he reproduces, “suddenly spring from his seat and walk to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father, whose memory he revered, as he did his mother’s.” [154] He had the “Horrors” more than once. He told Berkeley that these attacks of depression were the result of the attempt made by a gypsy crone to poison him, as related in “Lavengro.” The vicar and his wife visited Penquite one evening, and found Borrow sitting, sunk in despair, by the side of a huge fire, taking no notice of person or thing. He remained wrapped in his mood of melancholy for hours, and was only roused from it when Mrs. Berkeley sat down at the piano and softly played some old Scots and Irish airs. Then, after a while, he jumped up and danced about the room, and began to shout a joyous melody. The “Horrors” had been conjured away, and he was another man. He made up for his previous obsession by giving the company liberally of his best, pouring out good stories and side-splitting anecdotes as fast as he could recite them. And, as Mrs. Berkeley was leaving the room, he said to her, “Your music was as David’s harp to my soul.”
One of the sources of Borrow’s pride in his father was his long and loyal service as a soldier; he had no respect for people who beat the sword into a ploughshare. Berkeley records his retort upon a young man who was telling how he had retired from the army because “the army was—aw—no place for a gentleman now.”
“I should judge,” said Borrow, “that it was rather the other way.”
“Aw—what do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Why, this: that the army is no place for a man who is not a gentleman, and that such a person was right in leaving it.”
Borrow was fortunate, apparently, in the occasions of some of these Johnsonian fulminations. It is not everybody who would endure the treatment so mildly as did the ex-army officer, or that latitudinarian don who is reported once to have met Borrow at Dr. Hake’s house. The pundit preached at Borrow for some time, so runs the tale, and, when he had finished, Borrow thumped the table with his fist, crying, “Sir, you’re a fool!” As Punch very justly remarked about this prodigious narrative, because the article in which it appeared was in praise of Borrow, Borrow’s rudeness was made to appear to be “the end of the don for ever . . . there was no appeal.” Yet the don probably had a case, and if the article had been in praise of him, Borrow would certainly have been made to appear the fool. He has suffered not a little from the ill-regulated enthusiasm of admirers who insist on counting his petulance and his outbursts of boorishness as his minor virtues instead of his major vices.
A quaint commentary on anecdotes of this sort is Berkeley’s assertion that Borrow often repeated to him the answer he received from an old prize-fighter in reply to the question, “What is the best way to get through life quietly?”—“Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head.” Surely the most illuminating example of pure precept without example that can be unearthed in all literature. Berkeley shared the common fate of Borrow’s associates who supposed that a successful writer would care to discuss other writers. The genial vicar found how good a hater his visitor was; he displayed his spleen against the Martineaus; he foamed over the inoffensive Mrs. Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then the fashion, and Berkeley sang its praises. Borrow showed great excitement, and presently exploded invective against “a lot of Uncle Toms and Tomfools!” When he cooled down he had the grace to apologise for his vehemence.
But in all this intercourse with the lively Orangeman, of course, Borrow is to be seen only on one side, and that not the best, of his many-sided character. It was his controversial side. Berkeley, not native, had little intimate knowledge of Cornwall. Just one fact appears in his reminiscences which may fitly bridge the gulf between these episodes and Borrow’s real adventures. He liked to pore over the register of St. Cleer Church, where the names of so many Borrows were inscribed, and one day was sent into transports of delight by the discovery of a marriage record in which the woman’s name was Jenefer—a name commoner in Cornwall aforetime than at present. “Can you not see?” he cried. “It is Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife!”
Borrow, who wrote that fine passage about Stonehenge, which has been already quoted (p. 54), who waited for sunrise over that silent plain under the portal of giants, could not fail to be fascinated by the archæological riches of his father’s native place. Particularly was he entranced by the Trevethy Stone—alternatively “Trethevy.” Few parishes in the kingdom can boast a prehistoric structure of so elaborate a kind as this huge cromlech, few parish roads so great a store of relics of bygone art and ancient piety as the mile or so of parish road that Borrow traversed in order to reach it. It is at once the finest and the least-known cromlech in the West of England, and in a splendid state of preservation. The walls are four huge slabs of granite, only one of which has departed from the perpendicular; the roof is a fifth huge slab, in one corner of which is a round hole that has formed the theme of many a heated archæological discussion. If, as is supposed, the ancients (who without the assistance of machinery dealt with such enormous weights as these) first constructed great earthworks, and then pulled the rocks into position by rolling them up the slopes upon the trunks of fir-trees, the hole may have been used for the attachment of the ropes upon which the army of workmen hauled. Or the hole may be the work of weather, which has wrought such pixy-pranks in granite, as may be observed in the Devil’s Cheesewring not far off. The Trethevy cromlech must have been the memorial, and probably the burial-place, of some great chieftain. Whatever the grave or the cairn contained, it was, like all the other monuments of the kind, rifled ages ago, and nothing but the silent stones is left.
Borrow says of his sensations when he saw it, “A thrill came over me as I surveyed this gigantic erection.” He does not tell us what his speculations were as to the origin of the hole; but after he had climbed to the top and carefully measured every stone, he put his arm through the hole, and shouted, “Success to Old Cornwall!” He spares us the obvious comparison between the Eleusinian Mysteries and the rites of the Mên-an-tol, or holed stone, administered to Druidic neophytes.
From Penquite it was not a far cry, for a man who walked five miles in an hour with ease, to the great brown-backed hill of Caradon, seamed all along its foot with the wounds inflicted by centuries of miners. Caradon is twelve hundred feet high, and gives a wonderful prospect over two counties. From its summit, on a clear day, the Atlantic to the North and the Channel to the South are the limits of vision. Across the narrow gorge intervening strode the hat-less pedestrian of six-feet-three, looking like some nineteenth-century giant Caradon swallowing up the miles of bracken and heath, to the round hill where the Devil’s Cheesewring was piled, examining with curiosity, just below the peak, the hut of one Daniel Gumb. Gumb was no gnome, no pixy, no mythical person, as his name might almost betoken, but a veritable person in the flesh, stonemason and mathematician, who had carved in the block of granite that formed the roof of his dwelling-place a problem of Euclid. There are the squares and triangles remaining to this day to attest both his scholarship and his craft. On a heath near by, Borrow was shown three stone circles which carried his mind back three thousand years at least (Sir Norman Lockyer may be able to say how much more), “the Hurlers”—according to quaint tradition the petrified bodies of groups of profane persons who played the ancient Cornish game of hurling on a Sunday. There is one stone pillar a little distance to the south of the circles, which is said to have been the messenger who was going to St. Cleer for ale when the sudden petrifaction took place. This looks, however, like an excrescence of modern humour, probably conceived by a foreigner, since natives would joke with reluctance on such a subject. Sunday is a golfless day in Cornwall even now. Another and a less ribald version of the story was given to Borrow at Woolston. It related that while the hurlers were gathered where the three circles now are, on Cradock Moor there was a giant, who held in his hand a golden ball, which he was to throw over the tower of St. Cleer Church, and the first of the hurlers to find it was to possess it. The giant shared the fate of the other Sabbath-breakers, and is to be seen to this day on the moor in the form of “The Longstone”—an old round-headed cross.
A few miles in upon the moor to the north, Borrow twice visited the very heart and centre of Cornish romance—the lonely mountain pool of Dozmary. Set high among the wild, uncultivated hills, the pool breathes mystery. It is hundreds of feet above the river that winds down the combes: whence comes the water? The love of magical solutions for natural conundrums is deep-rooted. Colloquial opinion has held the pool in awe, reported it fathomless; and at the present day, to explain a lake at the top of a hill, with no visible intake of water, by saying it is fed from the inexhaustible reservoir of the peat in the surrounding country, is not held by some people to be facing the question adequately. But the spiritual and legendary mysteries of Dozmary were far more attractive to Borrow. It is reputed to be the original setting of two of the great legends of the world—the Passing of Arthur, and the Penance of Tregeagle.
Standing on the silver strand that belts the lake, on a moonlit night of such winter weather as Borrow found in the hills, it is easy to reconstruct the ritual of the Mort d’Arthur, either on the lines of Malory or those of Tennyson, to erect stately scenes and silent processionals, to enact the temptation of Bedivere, to select the clump of flags in which he hid the brand Excalibur, to see his three journeys to the shore, and finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm
“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”
It is easy to imagine the last scene of all—Arthur coming
“Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills,”
the funeral barge appearing on the waters, bearing the three queens, the commencement of the voyage into the unknown, to the island valley of Avalon. By the cold moonlight the spectacle fits the frame, for all distances are magnified and the awkward corners of daylight fact are obscured by the mysterious glamour. It is not the setting Tennyson has given to the Idyll, but it mates the story as told by Malory in his re-rendering from the French. It is not far over the hills to Slaughter Bridge, where Arthur is said to have received his mortal wound in combat with Sir Mordred; it is a dozen miles or so to King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel.
Fascinating as the great allegory is in any setting, it may be assumed, quite safely, that Borrow was even more keenly interested in the other, wilder, fiercer legend of Dozmary—the legend of Tregeagle. For, though he exclaimed his pleasure at detecting a resemblance between the names Jenefer and Guinevere in the parish records of St. Cleer, and afterwards made a journey to the Arthurian country to the north—when he passed by Caerleon on his tour through Wales, he did not turn aside to dream of the Round Table, but contented himself with mentioning Caerleon as “at one time one of the most considerable towns in Britain,” and went on to explain that whisky really was a corruption of the Erse word for water, and that meticulous accuracy would describe the fiery spirit as usquebaugh!
The Penance of Tregeagle was a very different matter. It is a variant of the universal Satanic legend. Tregeagle is a prototype of the immemorial man who makes compact with the Father of Evil, the bargain in this case being a hundred years of earthly pleasure in return for his soul immortal. The parable is an answer to the tragic question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Tregeagle was a shepherd, who, dissatisfied with his share of the good things of earth, expressed a petulant wish to possess all he could see. The Devil appeared to him in guise of Knight, arrayed in black armour, carrying a black lance, riding a black horse, accompanied by two black hounds of hell. The stranger challenged Tregeagle’s desire; for the forfeit of his soul at the end of a hundred years, he should have during those hundred years a castle and broad lands and endless riches. The shepherd accepted the terms; the Black Knight sounded his terrible horn and rode away, with the black hounds (which dominate the story in all its versions) snarling at his horse’s heels. In some form or other the dog is nearly always associated with the Satanic legend. In the Faust stories the Spirit of Evil is introduced as a dog. In “Tam o’ Shanter,”
“There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast,
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large.”
Upon the Devil’s departure, Tregeagle fell into a trance, and, when he awoke, the moors were changed into waving forests and verdant meadows, and on the hill where Dozmary had been stood a splendid castle. Tregeagle himself was arrayed in knightly costume, and saluted as their lord by a stately retinue.
In the course of his hundred years of prosperity all his fine stock of original sin had black and bloody development. Rapine, murder, and pillage went unchecked; he consummated his crimes by abducting the lovely virgin Goonhylda, daughter of the Earl of Cornwall, and shutting her up in the castle. Her father led an expedition to rescue her, and its arrival at Tregeagle’s gates precisely coincided with the expiration of his hundred years. And as the Earl’s messenger thundered there, the sound of the terrible horn and the sinister baying of hounds was heard; the Black Horseman came riding across the hills, calling upon Tregeagle to surrender himself, for that his bond was due.
Tregeagle, in a palsy of fear, stepped out, and was immediately stricken dead by a bolt from the black clouds that had suddenly o’erspread the scene. A storm raged, a spectre arose from the corpse of Tregeagle and fled into the murk, pursued by the grim huntsman and his hounds. When the storm had passed, the enchantment was over. Castle, forests and meadows had vanished; once more stretched the wide brown moors, glittered the surface of the pool. But Tregeagle was condemned for ever to the service of the Devil, who delights to set him Sisyphean tasks, of which the chief is to drain dry the pool of Dozmary by baling it with a limpet shell which has a hole in the bottom. Let him desist for a moment, and his torture begins; he flies shrieking before the Huntsman and his ghastly hounds. The spectre horseman and his pack are known as “The Devil and his Durdy Dogs.” The punishment of Tregeagle is only a small part of their business. They travel far and wide, not only over the moors but along the sea coasts, and their attentions are most fatal to those who happen to be abroad at night bent on deeds of evil. There is a tale of a herdsman who was on the moor of a winter’s night, and was chased by the Durdy Dogs, which came rushing down from a neighbouring tor. He could not run fast enough to escape, and just as they were close upon him he fell on his knees in prayer. Immediately the dogs stood at bay, howling ferociously. The terrible Huntsman shouted, “Bo Shrove!” (“the boy prays”), and at the word both he and his hounds vanished. [166] Similar legends of the yeth-hounds of Dartmoor are heard in Devonshire. As the black dogs hunt Tregeagle across the Cornish hills, their baying and his cries of agony are heard in lonely cottages at night. One draws closer to the chimney-corner as the wind pelts moaning athwart the waste, when this tradition is related to him by firelight in one of the crofts near by. Crying children are told that they are “roarin’ an’ howlin’ like Tregeagle.”
Borrow was deeply interested, not only in these larger legends of world-celebrity, but in the purely local folklore, the pixy stories of the peasantry. The Cornish pixies—or “piskies,” to use the vernacular—are diminutive fairies, generally dressed in green, very fond of mirth and mischief, some bad, but most good. They mislead men at night, for fun; then the only way to break the spell is for the victim to turn his coat inside out. They play practical jokes; they resemble, now Will o’ the Wisp, now the Scottish brownie, and again Robin Goodfellow; when properly propitiated they sometimes make gifts to their human neighbours of fairy food and fairy goblets. Borrow heard how the pixies mount horses’ heads at nights, and ride them about the fields, making stirrups of their manes; how they work in the mines, and are heard knocking in the levels underground, like the Duegars of northern latitudes; how some of them are under penance, like Tregeagle, to bale dry the pool of Dozmary.
Elizabeth Borrow, his cousin, related this characteristic story to him. A child belonging to poor parents was observed to have developed peculiarities. Among these was the fact that it could never get enough to eat. This is not, one might suppose, a peculiarity of children altogether confined to St. Cleer or even to Cornwall; but this child’s appetite was so abnormal that its relations decided to consult a wise woman about it. The witch told them that she had no doubt it was a pisky. She recommended them to put a large quantity of old shoes on a spit and make the child turn it, even if they had to beat it to compel it to the task. This procedure was adopted, and after a sound thrashing and much complaining the child was heard to say:
“I am four score years and more,
But never saw such a roast before.”
Then, as they were too young to have a child over eighty, the parents had proof positive that it was a pisky. The murder being out, after some time it disappeared, and their own child was magically restored to them.
“The Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks, lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse, on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be a crowd of people assembled to
“See the young lady
Get up on her horse”
when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit, alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons and two daughters still survive. [168] A charming lady of great age, the daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago. Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another. He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”
It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost without interruption, till they returned.”
There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair. One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.
Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen. The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the “court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.
This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr. William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited Woolston to see.
Mr. Pollard, in his ninetieth year, was a prisoner in a canopied bed, but with a mind clear and logical, and full of memories and interests. Scattered around him were newspapers and books, and one of the books a contemporary of Borrow himself. “A very strange, wild person,” was his introductory description of Borrow; “a very tall, upstanding man, wiry and lithe, with a strong face and snow-white hair. He looked fit for anything, and I believe he was—that he feared no man nor devil. I remember the first evening he came here. We had tea in the parlour, and, farmhouse fashion, we had some roast beef on the table, which my father carved. After tea, somebody suggested that he should sing a song. He did sing it, and a weird, wailing, outlandish song it was. No—not a gypsy song. . . . Maybe it was the song of Swayne Vonved. He got up and waved his arms as he sang of his hero’s adventures, he fought an imaginary foe, and finally, as he worked himself into a fervour of passionate song, he seized the carving-knife from the table and swished it round his head. We all drew back, and some of us were glad when the song was over and he dropped that carving-knife and sat down. His voice was tremendous—‘as big as Tregeagle’s,’ as we say in Cornwall.”
Not only the legendary lore and the ancient language of Cornwall interested Borrow; he was equally attracted by the physical characteristics of the peninsula, and impressed by the great wealth lying dormant in the incalculable masses of granite on the moors. “If I were a rich man,” he exclaimed, “I would buy up all this granite; it will be wanted one day.” The demand for Cornish granite in various great public works and the present activity of the quarries at the Cheesewring illustrate his foresight.
The Woolston people were particularly struck by Borrow’s intense enthusiasm for the legend and the poetry of the North. He himself relates how, on a walking tour farther west, he faced eight dreary miles on a rainy evening, solacing himself by singing:
“Look out, look out, Swayne Vonved!”
the Danish ballad he had translated more than thirty years before. At Woolston he made the Vikings live again for them. “He gave us Odin and Thor without ceasing.” There never could have been so much Norse mythology in that part of Cornwall before. Some of the ladies seem to have fallen in love with his hair, but could not summon up courage to beg a lock; and one of them saved his combings and preserved them in tissue-paper for years.
The keen, almost boyish, delight which Borrow took in everything he saw and heard in the hills, and his complaisance towards the company he met, are remarkable in the man whose odd misanthropic fancies and wretched, paltry miseries we have been watching during many pages. The contrast is vivid indeed. In Cornwall Borrow was both pleased and pleasing—with occasional outbursts such as the display of spleen against “Uncle Tomfools”—whether he were riding with “the gallant girl” over the snowy country, listening to her superstitions about magpies—
“One for sorrow, two for mirth;
Three for a wedding, four for death” [174a]
—or visiting patriarchal villagers at Tremar to hear their stories of pixies and foxes, [174b] or attending rural dinner parties, with all the neighbourhood beaten up in his honour. Some of the pixy stories have been given. The attitude of the countryside towards the fox in that day was shockingly unorthodox. He was vermin to be destroyed whenever and wherever discovered: did he not wreak incalculable damage in the farmyard by various and subtle devices, such as taking his brush in his teeth and whirling round like a teetotum under the poultry perches, till the unhappy fowls, rendered dizzy by the unaccustomed spectacle, fell an easy prey to his rapacious appetite? How a fox was shot and the murderer brought his victim for admiration both of the brush and the deed, is related without the turning of a hair. The crime was so common as to be merely a habit; Mr. Baring-Gould, in his story of Parson Jack Russell, has given a similar account of the ethics of certain districts in Devonshire about the same period.
Borrow revealed his curiosity and enthusiasm in many ways. On one occasion a young lady named Every was of the party at Woolston. Part of the conversation turned—as it inevitably would where Borrow was concerned—on Cornish names and their derivations. The girl asked him if he could tell her anything about her name. His mind flew at once to the one Every or Avery whose career was familiar to him, that Captain John, of Plymouth, the fierce pirate of the Eastern Seas, the mortal enemy of John Company, who was reputed to have become a king in Madagascar—one of the choicest villains in the history of the world. “I said that the most celebrated person who ever bore it was a buccaneer, whereupon she informed me that her grandmother had told her that she was descended from a famous pirate.” And he adds the suggestive commentary, “Very pleasant party!” [176]
One of the most interesting gatherings arranged for him, of course, was the family dinner party at the old farmhouse of Tredinnick, where his father was born. According to Berkeley, who was among the guests, nearly all the Borrows of the district were present, and George was highly excited, with his mind constantly running upon the father whom he had worshipped. The circumstances of the feast and the memories it aroused were too much for him; he ceased to be merry and talkative, and closed up his store of song and story; instead of exerting himself to amuse his friends, he sat with restless glance wandering around the rooms in which old Captain Tom had spent his boyhood; his eyes were moist. Suddenly he left the party and burst into the open air—meeting with an ugly tumble over a low wall into the yard. “Well,” said he to Berkeley as they parted for the night, “we have shared the old-fashioned hospitality of old-fashioned people in an old-fashioned house.” He was overwrought to an extraordinary extent, and the excitement, together with the shock of his little accident, brought on an indisposition that kept him laid up all next day.
Having been a little more than a fortnight at Penquite, he began his walking tour through Cornwall to the extreme west. At Mousehole, not far from the Land’s End, lived one Burney, an officer of the coastguard, who was a distant connection of the family. Taylor had given Borrow a letter of introduction to him. “You can only see Cornwall or know anything about it by walking through it,” he wrote to his wife. The secrets of Cornwall, the conditions of its detachment, the spell of its romance, can only be penetrated by the man who “the known track . . . deserts, and has a by-way of his own.” He must explore its hills and combes, and its remoter villages for their archæological treasures—whether of the prehistoric races who have left their mark upon its sad grey stones, or of the saints and heroes of the early Christian time, or of the authors and the actors of its Mystery Plays—and he must know the simple folk of its ancient blood to probe the riches of their lore. Even Borrow hardly turned far enough aside from the beaten paths to get more than a very general impression of the country; but he was a man who observed readily and absorbed eagerly.
Nicholas Borrow, his cousin, was his topographical mentor and guide on many expeditions, and, now that he was leaving for the West, accompanied him on horseback across country to set him in the main road. He saw Tremewth, where his father’s comrade, Thomas Honey, lived on the top of the hill, and the field near Redgate containing the grave of King Doniert (or Dungerth), the lord of the Western Britons in the ninth century, with its broken pillar and Latin inscription. Parting with his cousin, he walked on to Lostwithiel, the end of his first day’s journey, took his ease in the Talbot Inn, and feasted on roast fowl and bacon. The ancient stannary town, with its shire hall dating from the thirteenth century, and its memories of the Civil War—when Essex stabled his horses in the church, and his troopers brought a horse to the font and with a mock baptism sardonically gave it the name of Charles—produced mingled emotions in Borrow’s mind, for, in spite of his militant Protestantism, he was a staunch Tory and a Royalist. Turning aside to see the hoary Castle of Restormel, which had been a ruin since the time of Edward the Third, he recorded some vivid impressions of the neighbourhood as “the most beautiful he ever saw.”
They will not appear exaggerated to those who have approached it as Borrow did through the wonderful Glyn Valley, by the road which follows the river brawling down from its moorland birthplace towards the sea at Fowey. The second day he covered twenty-four miles to Truro. The sight of a cairn on a hill top “brought the Spirit of Old upon my mind.” Antiquis debetur reverentia was always a potent principle with Borrow; nevertheless, the modern Protestant within him sometimes got the better of the antiquary. On the previous day he had seen a cross, and examined it. This monument “seemed to have been raised by some Puseyite. The base contained a nonsensical inscription to the effect that it had been erected on a place which had been devoted to ‘Druidic Idolatry.’ The Druids were no idolaters, though the Papists are.” [179] It was darkening to evening when he passed through Grampound, one of the minute derelict boroughs of Cornwall, whose disfranchisement in 1821 was the one and only result of Lord John Russell’s first agitation against electoral corruption. The appearance of The Dolphin Inn, looking snug with its lighted windows and air of warmth and comfort, was a strong invitation to a tired wayfarer who had more often than most men
“. . . by care oppressed
Found in an inn a place of rest.”
He looked wistfully at it, but withstood the temptation (with the assistance of Swayne Vonved), and pushed on through the rainy night to Truro, and to dinner and bed at the Royal Hotel.
In the morning he inspected the town, and visited the church—which no longer exists save as a fragment built into the northern side of Benson’s great cathedral—and then started again for the West. His walk extended no farther than ten miles that day. On his arrival at Redruth, one of the centres of the mining district, he was arrested by the great hill of Carn Brea, to the north-west of the town. Its noble summit is one of the most striking features of the landscape viewed from any part of West Cornwall, and it is the haunt of many legends—mostly unauthentic and nearly all ridiculous. The entertaining old Borlase, in his “Antiquities of Cornwall,” invented a grotesque set of theories about the origin of the curiously-shaped rocks that strew the long length of the hill’s crest. Borlase saw Druids everywhere, and Druidical sculpture in every freak Nature had played through countless centuries with the granite which she found so pliable. It was inconceivable in his time that the “basins” and channels in the rocks of Carn Brea could have been merely the result of “weathering,” as the geologists inform us now they must have been. “In yonder grave a Druid lies” was predicated by Borlase of every mound he saw. One perceives that Borrow adopted all his theories without modification. On Carn Brea he was not merely on a magnificent precipitous hill, with a wide-stretching view away to the Atlantic on the north; he was in the midst of a thousand memories of the past; the “Spirit of Old” came upon him again; white-robed priests defiled along the heather, and performed their sacrificial rites upon the granite altars. The notes he made about Carn Brea were, says he, “written on the top of the sacrificial rock. In the upper basin, the horrid place of sacrifice, there are outlets for the blood to stream down. There seem to be about eight basins in all.” William Borlase himself could have accomplished nothing better than that.
On January 12th he set off from Redruth towards Penzance in torrents of rain. Just above Rosewarne he came across a gypsy caravan, and of necessity must go to find its inhabitants and talk with them. A dark woman addressed him; he asked her her name in Romany. She pretended at first not to understand, but finally answered him. Presently her husband, “a remarkably knavish-looking personage,” put out his head and began to discourse with him. He told him that their name was Bosvile. It will be remembered that the “Flaming Tinman” of Mumper’s Dingle was called Bosvile. The Bosviles, or Boswells, as they were called in later days, were, in fact, a well-known tribe of gypsies in the West of England. Another family, real Cornish in all their associations, formed a branch of the ubiquitous Smiths. In 1866 they departed from England almost in a body for America, where most of the Stanleys and the Coopers had already gone.
While talking with Bosvile and his mort, Borrow heard the sound of fiddles in an adjoining tent, and was invited to join the company, for doubtless his perfect knowledge of the language and his unfailing fascination over the gypsies had overcome all their first suspicions; but he told them that he was “mokhado” (muddy and dirty), gave them a four-penny piece, and departed. He went through Hayle, then, and now, one of the Cornish homes of industry, which he contemptuously dismisses as “a filthy place.” Reaching Penzance in the evening, he dined at the Union Hotel, and held converse with a mining agent, whom he discovered to be “a sensible man, full of Cornish patriotism.”
On the 13th he turned up Mr. Burney at Mousehole, one of the quaintest fishing villages among the hundred peppered round the Cornish coast, and found him excellent company. There is just a glimpse in his memoranda of the kind of miscellany Borrow might have given to the world if he had ever written his book on Cornwall—a mixture of travel and religion, legend and dialogue, philology and adventure. A page or two would certainly have been occupied by the story which Burney told him the first day they met of his doings on the West Coast of Africa—many naval officers of the mid-century could relate good stories of slave-chasing in those regions—and especially of the triumphant expedition to the town of a native king, who at first resisted their demands, his capital being fortified and defended by thirty guns of sorts. The essence of the tale was that while the palaver was in progress Burney’s gunner went round and drenched the touch-holes of all the thirty defending pieces. Borrow returned to Penzance that night: again, had the book been written, we should doubtless have been in possession of the full narrative of the experiences of that mining agent who had been in Greenland; but he is only just dotted down, a bare, unclothed lay figure in the surviving Notes. For the rest of his time in West Penwith, Borrow was the guest of Mr. Burney, exploring the country of Dolly Pentreath, who in the eighteenth century had spoken the Cornish language, and examining the traces there remaining of the Spanish expedition against the Cornish coasts in 1595. On the Sunday he went to church at Paul (where Dolly Pentreath was buried), and in the evening “read the Bible and prayers to the family” of Burney.
There was, of course, a trip to St. Michael’s Mount, the show-place of those parts, that castle on an island in Mount’s Bay, which approaches in singularity and beauty, if it does not quite reach the glory of, its namesake Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy. Borrow went with Burney by boat from Mousehole, and observed with curiosity the points of greatest interest on the island and about the buildings—the bastion by which the Parliamentarians were said to have entered when they attacked the place during the Civil War, the chapel within the castle, and the stone vault underneath it in which a skeleton was found. Full of his scheme for the book on Cornwall, he made his memoranda as he went in order that the impressions might be quite fresh. Just as he set down old William Borlase’s superstitions “on the top of the sacrificial rock” at Carn Brea, so he records that his notes on St. Michael’s Mount were written in the vault.
Borrow returned from the Mount on foot to Mousehole, and two days later started upon an expedition to the most impressive part of the Cornish coast—the Logan Rock and Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the spot where Charles Wesley is reputed to have written his famous hymn:
“Here on a narrow neck of land
’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.”
The traveller, however, says very little about the magnificent scenery, and a great deal about the companion of his travels. In “The Romany Rye,” when Lavengro has succeeded in divorcing his old friend Murtagh from the disreputable trade of a thimble-engro, it will be remembered that, in order to elevate the Irish boy’s spirits, he induces him to tell a story.
“Cheer up, man,” said I, “and let’s have the story, and let it be about Ma-Coul and the salmon and his thumb.”
But the tale of the finding of Finn-Ma-Coul in Veintry Bay, his servitude of Dermod David Odeen, his cooking of the salmon, the blister on his skin, his discovery of all witchcraft by the sucking of his thumb, and all the rest of it, was not related to Lavengro in the ’twenties by Murtagh at Horncastle Fair. It was told to him on the Cornish cliff paths by one Cronan, the Irish guide who was conducting him to the Logan Rock, as the Notebook shows, and inserted after Borrow got back to Norfolk to lend the colour of romance to the end of “The Romany Rye.” Of Cronan’s fairy stories, one is cited at length—the tale of the Clog Vreach, or the parti-coloured stone, under the heading, “An Irish Fairy Tale, told on a Wild Road by a Wild Native.” [185] It is a tale of a drunken blackguard and tyrannical landlord, who vowed that he would shoot all the fairies to be found on the moor where the Clog Vreach stood. He went there and fired off all his ammunition, but when he returned his body was bent, his tongue was hanging out, and his servants, seeing that he was next door to dead, put him to bed, and four people poured raw brandy down his throat all night. After that it is not surprising to learn that in twenty-four hours his body had turned black and life had left him. Cronan did not attribute his death to this remarkable prescription, but rather to the vengeance of the supernatural powers. “And,” says he, “a very fitting end it was for a person who was a tyrant and interfered with the fairies.”
These things seem to have occupied Borrow on the journey to the exclusion of all else. Before he left the district, however, he made some extracts from the register of Paul Church, recording the death of a Keigwin killed by the Spaniards in 1595, and the death of Dolly Pentreath (entered in her married name of Dorothy Jeffery) in 1777. He had hunted up an old man of eighty at Mousehole, who in his boyhood had seen and heard Dolly Pentreath, and he had made a long list of Cornish words taken down from the lips of aged persons in that village. No doubt the Cornish book was intended to include a vocabulary of the old tongue.
I do not know of any evidence that Borrow had made a study of the Cornish language in previous years, but his command of Welsh, and in a less degree his knowledge of the three variants of Gaelic, made almost the whole of the Cornish words surviving, in names of places and people, and in peculiarities of local dialect, easily understood of him. There is a general resemblance between Cornish and Welsh about which, I am told, all writers agree, though they differ as to its exact extent. But the truth is probably not far from the statement of Sir John Dodridge, who in 1630 said of the Cornish: “They have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” Mr. Henry Jenner, F.S.A., in his admirable “Handbook of the Cornish Language,” states that Welsh, Cornish, and Breton “may be said to be as near together as three separate languages can well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted three dialects of the same language.”
The principal differences between Cornish and Welsh can be stated very briefly. The following points show the main divergences between the Cornish of the later literary remains and the Welsh of the books and newspapers of the present day:—
(a) Certain grammatical differences, such as the occasional use of an indefinite article, never employed in Welsh.
(b) A number of variations in vocabulary, in which Cornish will often be found to have used a word current in contemporary Breton in place of one current in contemporary Welsh. This is not surprising, even if it be not assumed that the language was taken into Brittany from England, for the relations between the shipping ports of Cornwall and Brittany were exceedingly close, especially those relations of contraband traffic so dear to the hearts of the writers of romance.
(c) Phonetic changes resembling corruptions, such as the substitution of “j” or English “ch” for “d” or “t” in the bodies or the beginnings of words, and of “s” or “z” for the same letters at the ends of words. [187]
It will be seen that Borrow could have found such differences as these no stumbling-block to his philological excursions. He would readily recognise Tywardreath as the equivalent of the Welsh, Tywardraeth, the house on the sands, and would be assisted thereto by the sight of the wide stretches of white sand fringing St. Austell Bay in the angle where Tywardreath stands on its hill side. He would identify Hendra as Hendre, the old stead; Chyandour as Tyrdwr, the house of the water; Egloskerry as Eglwyscerrig, the stone church; and such forms as nance for nant, a ravine, pons for pont, a bridge, plou for plwyf, a parish, would offer no difficulty to one familiar with parallel changes in other groups of languages.
By January 26th, 1854, Borrow was back among his friends at Penquite, bursting in upon them lyrically with:
“Behold the man who’s been at Kinmel Dray,
Who passed by Kinmel Cres upon his way,
And who at Kinmel Worthey made a stay.”
He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is the huge rock structure popularly known as “King Arthur’s Bed.” The Arthurian mood, to be developed presently, was already coming upon him. When, next day, he walked to Liskeard, to visit the ex-Mayor once more, and met the worthy Town Clerk, the talk turned from “Jew houses” to King Arthur’s court, and his imaginative vision darted off to the North and the golden traditions of glorious Camelot. On these he brooded while he walked, and while he sat by the roaring fire of hazel faggots in the kitchen of Penquite. Not that he allowed these ethereal matters to engross him entirely, for he was curious about the cost of hazel-wood as fuel—remembering that he had burnt it at the shrine of Isopel, the “Queen of the Dingle,” thirty years gone. So he notes: “Hazel faggots, 10s. a hundred, at 30 lbs.”
Going about among the natives, he disdained no unconsidered trifle of lore and knowledge. Cornish phrases struck his fancy, such as “bread baked in the clome”—in earthenware “kettles” on the open hearth, covered with burning peat, bread of such a rare flavour and quality, indeed, as twentieth-century man cannot conceive, even in St. Cleer, where the “machine-baked” variety is now hawked by half a dozen enterprising bakers from the neighbouring towns. There is another Cornish delicacy which does persist; it is known as “thunder and lightning”—a soupçon of sugar syrup over the clotted cream of the country. “Poor old Philp,” he records one of his relatives as narrating among the characteristics of a local notoriety—“Poor old Philp used to like ‘triggle’ over cream.”
One story given to him by Mr. Taylor was of an old man who built himself a hovel of turf on Kilmar Tor. In the winter of 1814 there was a great snow-storm, and the old man’s hut was buried in the drifts for two nights and two days. When they dug him out they found that he had been in bed all the time, and declared that it was “the longest night I ever knawed; I thought t’d never end.”
There was another dinner party at the old house of his forefathers. He ploughed to Tredinnick through the drizzle of a “soft” Cornish day. “Ben’t got wet, ha’ thee?” was the salutation of William Borrow, aged seventy, welcoming him to the homestead. One of his few stumbling-blocks was the Cornish dialect. “My relations are most excellent people,” he wrote to his wife, “but I could not understand more than half of what they said.” The simplicity of their mode of life was a surprise to him, and probably a pleasant one; he found no affectation of gentility among them. Wealth to the extent of £70,000 was reported to be in the united hands of the family, but the head of it, Henry Borrow, “lives in a house in which there is not a single grate—nothing but open chimneys.”
Discussions about the character and attributes of the pixies were constant. Henry could hardly tell him whether he believed in the pixies or not; but he did believe in the Durdy Dogs, having himself heard them giving tongue. If Henry had confessed to a faith in pixies, he need not have been ashamed of his intellectual company. The belief was shared by no smaller a person than the redoubtable Hawker of Morwenstow, who saw and chased a pixy two years later as he rode through a gorge on the way home from Wellcombe. He relates how he felt himself “flush and then grow pale” when he saw a “brown, rough shape” start up among the furze bushes, and how, “remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to the Sign,” he made the sign in the air before urging his horse towards the creature—which, of course, escaped!
Pixies, legends, and philology, however, all took a place in his keen inquiries secondary to authentic recollections of his father’s youth. He makes full notes of two anecdotes related to him. Henry Borrow’s account of the Menheniot Fair affray, as the traveller pencilled it down, is full of delicious filial exultation, which is repeated in another story, narrated to him by Thomas Borrow, of Lamellion, and thus set forth:
“My father.—At one time, at Bodmin Bridge, was a big, bony man six foot high, the terror of everybody at Plymouth and Devonport. My father fought him at Liskeard, just by a butcher’s shop. My father struck him a blow which sent him staggering across the street into a cooper’s shop. He got up and came on again, saying, ‘Where is Borrow?’ ‘Here I am,’ said my father, and struck him another blow which knocked him down, after staggering six yards. He was dreadfully sick, and did not ask for Borrow again.”
There is a pathetic as well as a humorous interest in these explorations of Cornish memory for traces of the father who had died in so much doubt as to the future of this son, and so much well-justified scepticism about the prospect of his maintaining himself on his “Armenian or other acquirements.”
Borrow became increasingly anxious to see the wild country on the rock-bound north coast before he left the Duchy for London. Letters from Mrs. Pollard mention his desire to inspect “King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagell.” On February 1st he left Penquite for Tredinnick, to spend a last day and night with the Borrow family there, and to brood again over the memories of his father which the little old house awoke. It was the only night he had slept at Tredinnick; he had been previously “much affected on being taken upstairs, at the remembrance of his father, and shed tears.” After breakfast the next day he set off for a rough cross-country ride, mounted on a horse named Triumph, and accompanied by his cousin, Nicholas Borrow. By way of the road he had twice traversed with Miss Taylor, past Doniert’s grave, by Redgate, and along the valley of the lonely Dreynes river, they cantered to Bolventor and the Jamaica Inn. The derelict village of Bolventor consists at the present time mainly of a large building set in a square of grass-grown cobbles—the erstwhile famous Jamaica Inn. Now deprived of a licence, and selling mineral waters to casual and disconsolate wayfarers or thirsty cyclists, this hostelry, at the time of Borrow’s visit, was a place of some importance—a coaching house upon the main road between London and Falmouth. Not many years before it had been busy day and night with scenes such as those described in the account of the inn in “The Romany Rye,” where Lavengro acted as hostler and clerk of the stables. The coaches clattered over the cobble-stones, and the square echoed with the cries of jarveys and postilions, and the rattle of harness, and the champing of bits. It was already beginning to decline in 1854; for the railway was building far to the south, and a new line of traffic was being opened up.
The two horsemen; now within sight of the greatest hills of Cornwall, Brown Willy and Rough Tor, left the road and struck across the heath in the direction of the mountainous northern horizon. “We then proceeded,” wrote Borrow, “over moor and moss, till we came to a stream, which we forded. It was rocky and dangerous.” If this was, as I suppose, Hanter Gantick, the great ravine in which the Lanke river roars down between banks composed of huge aggregations of granite boulders, the description was not too bold. Even in his wildest adventure, he could hardly have attempted to get a horse across a worse place. “We then ascended another hill, on the top of which we saw at a distance an inhabited country.” The eminence was probably Rough Tor moor, and the cultivated land the undulating country to the north of the central wild. Whichever of the cluster of hills it was, it could not have failed of interest for Borrow. They provided him with hut circles, with a great Logan stone encrusted with Druidical superstitions, the court or “hall” of King Arthur which he had been discussing at Liskeard with Mr. Jago, and the remains of a chapel to St. Michael, whose gate arch was removed some twenty years before to make a doorway for the Britannia Inn, near Altarnun! Having seen his cousin through the wilderness, and pointed out to him the Pisgah sight of “an inhabited country,” Nicholas Borrow bade him an affectionate farewell, and returned with the horses to Tredinnick, while George set out on foot alone to reach Camelford. “I passed by a place called Carn Long, and, striding forward, found myself at Camelford before I expected. A wilder journey over moss and moor I never made.” The “moss,” by which he betokens the bogs in the neighbourhood of Brown Willy, is a notorious great hindrance to travellers who would otherwise ascend these hills in much larger numbers.
The extraordinary scenery and the romantic associations of the country upon which he was now entering amply repaid him for the toils and pains of his day’s scramble across the backbone of Cornwall. He was in King Arthur’s land. At Camelford he trod a battlefield ten centuries old, for here it was that Egbert the Saxon met the Britons of the West in 823. Borrow did not linger in the quaint old town, but pushed on towards Tintagel by way of Slaughter Bridge already mentioned, which inherited its grisly name from that “last weird battle in the West,” where Mordred fell and Arthur received his mortal hurt. Enthusiastic local authorities, more confident than the general, are able to give the date of the conflict as A.D. 543. “At last I reached Tintagel, about 6.30 p.m., and went to an inn (the Wharncliffe Arms), kept by Symmonds,” to whom he had been recommended from Penquite. After such a day he was glad of its shelter and of the creature comforts it offered to a tired man on a cold February night.