to be articled to Messrs. Simpson and
Rackham of Tuck's Court, St. Giles, he apparently offered no objection,
and his recollections of the years when he was tied to a lawyer's desk
were always pleasant to him in after-life.

But these pleasant recollections had little to do with the duties of his
calling--they arose rather from the fact that his work was easy, and so
intermittent as to give him ample opportunity for indulging in his
day-dreams. Who can doubt the personal basis of that passage in
"Lavengro" in which he says: "Yes, very pleasant times were those, when
within the womb of a lofty desk, behind which I sat for some hours every
day, transcribing (when I imagined eyes were upon me) documents of every
description in every possible hand. Blackstone kept company with Ab
Gwilym--the polished English lawyer of the last century, who wrote long
and prosy chapters on the rights of things--with a certain wild Welshman,
who some four hundred years before that time indited immortal cowydds or
odes to the wives of Cambrian chieftains--more particularly to one
Morfydd, the wife of a certain hunch-backed dignitary called by the poet
facetiously Bwa Bach--generally terminating with the modest request of a
little private parlance beneath the greenwood bough, with no other
witness than the eos, or nightingale; a request which, if the poet may be
believed, rather a doubtful point, was seldom, very seldom, denied. And
by what strange chance had Gwilym and Blackstone, two personages so
exceedingly different, been thus brought together? From what the reader
already knows of me, he may be quite prepared to find me reading the
former; but what could have induced me to take up Blackstone, or rather
law?"

Yes, there was little in Borrow's nature that was in common with that of
the followers of the legal profession. What food for his wild
imagination could he find in the prosy records and dry-as-dust documents
of a lawyer's office? They contained words that to him, as to many of
his master's clients, were without meaning: his thoughts wandered beyond
their mazy entanglements into a realm where the law that restrained was
that of Nature alone, and whose only order was planned by the spirit that
sent forth shadows and dreams. He had been too much of a rover, had seen
too many strange sights in his young life, to be able to satisfy his
cravings for knowledge in musty law tomes and dusty deeds. His curiosity
had been aroused by ma