rn at East Dereham, "a beautiful little town in the western division of
Norfolk," on July 5, 1803. His father, who came of an old Cornish
family, was in his forty-fifth year when Borrow was born, having married
ten years previously Anne Perfrement, of a family which had migrated from
Dauphine in the days of Dutch William. The father was captain in a
marching regiment, the West Norfolk Militia. Like Sterne's therefore,
Borrow's early life was nomadic, and his school-life was broken between
Edinburgh, Clonmel, and Norwich. But his real mentors were found in this
last city, where he came in contact with a French _emigre_ named
d'Eterville. Here, too, he fell under the influence of "godless Billy"
Taylor, and dreamt of writing plays and poems and abusing religion.
Here, too, while he ought to have been studying law, he was claiming
acquaintance with gipsies, bruisers, and shady characters, such as the
notorious Thurtell. A more dangerous influence to Borrow than any,
perhaps, was that of Sir John Bowring, a plausible polyglot, who
deliberately used his facility in acquiring and translating tongues as a
ladder to an administrative post abroad. Borrow, as was perhaps natural,
put a wrong construction upon his sympathy, and his apparently
disinterested ambition to leave no poetic fragment in Russian, Swedish,
Polish, Servian, Bohemian, or Hungarian unrendered into English. He
determined to emulate a purpose so lofty in its detachment, and the
mistake cost him dear, for it led him for long years into a veritable
_cul de sac_ of literature; it led also to the accentuation of that
pseudo-philological mania which played such havoc with the ordinary
development of rational ideas in a man in many respects so sane as
Borrow.

An entirely erroneous belief in the marketable value of Danish ballads,
Welsh triads, Russian folk-songs, and the like in rococo English
translations after the Bowring pattern led Borrow to exchange an
attorney's office for a garret in Grub-street. His immediate ambition
was something between Goldsmith's and Chatterton's ballads, Homeric odes,
epics, plays; he was, at all hazards, to write something grand--"to be
stared at, lifted on peoples' shoulders." He found his Griffiths in Sir
Richard Phillips, the radical alderman and philanthropic sweater, under
whose tender mercies he rapidly developed a suicidal tendency, until in
May, 1825, a windfall of 20 pounds enabled him to break his chain and
escape t