icture,
He to a matter-of-fact still softening, paring, abating,
He to the great might-have-been upsoaring, sublime and ideal,
He to the merest it-was restricting, diminishing, dwarfing,
River to streamlet reducing, and fall to slope subduing:
So it was told, the Piper narrating, corrected of Arthur.

George Borrow, like many another great man, was born in Norfolk, at East
Dereham, in 1803, and at an early age began those rambles he has made
famous, being carried about by his father, Captain Borrow, who was
chiefly employed as a recruiting officer. The reader of _Lavengro_ may
safely be left to make out his own itinerary. Whilst in Edinburgh Borrow
attended the High School, and acquired the Scottish accent. It is not
too much to say that he has managed to make even Edinburgh more romantic
simply by abiding there for a season. From Scotland he went to Ireland,
and learnt to ride, as well as to talk the Irish tongue, and to seek
etymologies wherever they were or were not to be found. But for a famous
Irish cob, whose hoofs still sound in our ears, Borrow, so he says, might
have become a mere philologist. From Ireland he returned with his
parents to Norwich, and resumed studies, which must have been, from a
schoolmaster's point of view, grievously interrupted, under the Rev.
Edward Valpy at King Edward's School. Here he seems to have been for two
or three years. Dr. Jessopp has told us the story of Borrow's dyeing his
face with walnut juice, and Valpy gravely inquiring of him, 'Borrow, are
you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?' The Rajah of Sarawak,
Sir Archdale Wilson, and the Rev. James Martineau were at school with
'Lavengro.' Dr. Jessopp, who in 1859 became headmaster of King Edward's
School, and who has been a Borrovian from the beginning, found the school
tradition to be that Borrow, who never reached the sixth form, was
indolent and even stupid. In 1819,--the reader will be glad of a
date,--Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich,
and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying
deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,--a harmless
pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention
of young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place. Neither of these
distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is
called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had
once the