ancer. But I must
join issue with him here, and you, I know, will forgive me for taking up
your time with the matter; for if Mr. Watts-Dunton were right, one of the
chief glories would be shorn from our East Anglian traditions. He denies
in the Introduction to a new edition of _The Romany Rye_, just published,
the claim of Borrow to be an East Anglian, although Borrow himself
insisted that he was one.

One might as well call Charlotte Bronte a Yorkshire woman as call
Borrow an East Anglian. He was no more an East Anglian than an
Irishman born in London is an Englishman. His father was a Cornishman
and his mother 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
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.

Well, I am not prepared to question the suggestion that East Anglia is
the hub of the universe, only to question Mr. Watts-Dunton's position.
There is virtue in that qualification of his that there was "very little"
East Anglian blood in the veins of Borrow's mother, and that she was
"mainly" French. As a matter of fact she was, of course, partly East
Anglian; that is to say, she must have had two or three generations of
East Anglian blood in her, seeing that it was her great-grandfather who
settled in Norfolk from France, and he and his children and grandchildren
intermarried with the race. But I do not pin my claim for Borrow upon
that fact--the fact of three generations of his mother's family at
Dumpling Green--or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham.
There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influenced
greatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birth
or ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is the
custom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came of
English parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years in
England. Nevertheless, he may be justly claimed by the sister-island,
for during a long sojourn in that country he became permeated with the
subtle influence of the Irish race, and in many things he thought and
felt as an Irishman. It is the custom to speak of Maria Edgeworth as an
Irish