ing Borrow to have been an East
Anglian. Not that this is surprising, seeing that Borrow himself shared
the same mistake--a mistake upon which I have on a previous occasion
remarked. I have said elsewhere that one might as well call Charlotte
Bronte a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of
course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an
Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics, and this
explains the Norfolk prejudice against him. He inherited nothing from
Norfolk save his accent--unless it were that love of "leg of mutton and
turnips" which Mr. Hake and I have so often seen exemplified. The reason
why Borrow was so misjudged in Norfolk was, as I have hinted above, that
the racial characteristics of the Celt and the East Anglian clashed too
severely. Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the
locality that has given birth to a man influences his imagination
throughout his life. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class
family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his
native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a
recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and
Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in
Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not
one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow's father, and
very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow's ancestry was pure
Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the
egotism of Borrow--perhaps I should have said, such is the egotism of
human nature--that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made
him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.
East Anglia, however, seems to have cherished a very different feeling
towards Borrow. Another mistake of Mr. Hake's is in supposing that
Borrow gave me the lovely incident of the gypsy child weeping in the
churchyard because "the poor dead gorgios could not hear the church
bells." As this mistake has been shared by others, and has appeared in
print, I may as well say that it was a real incident in the life of a
well-known Romany chi, from whom I have this very morning received a
charming letter dated from "the van in the field," where she has settled
for the winter.

The anecdote about Borrow and the gypsy child who was, or seemed to be,
suffering thr