reputed to be Borrow's sole surviving schoolfellow, in order to
gather information or test traditions about his schooldays.
This was with a view to a memoir which he was compiling, he
said, out of the literary remains which had been committed to
him by his executors. I communicated to him such recollections
as I could clearly depend upon and leave at his disposal for
publication or for suppression as he might think fit. Under
these circumstances I feel that they are rightfully his, and
that I am restrained from placing them at disposal elsewhere
unless and until he renounces his claim upon them. But though I
cannot repeat them at length for public use, I am not precluded
from correcting inaccuracies in stories already in circulation,
and may therefore say that Mr. Arthur Dalrymple's version of
the Yarmouth escapade is wrong in making his brother John a
partner in the transaction. John had quite too much sense for
that; the only victims of Borrow's romance were two or three
silly boys--mere lackeys of Borrow's commanding will--who
helped him to make up a kit for the common knapsack by
pilferings out of their fathers' shops.

The Norwich gentleman who fell in with the boys lying in the
hedgerow near the half-way inn knew one of them, and wormed out
of him the drift of their enterprise, and engaging a postchaise
packed them all into it, and in his gig saw them safe home.

It is true that I had to _hoist_ (not 'horse') Borrow for his
flogging, but not that there was anything exceptional or
capable of leaving permanent scars in the infliction. Mr. Valpy
was not given to excess of that kind.

I have never read _Lavengro_, and cannot give any opinion about
the correct spelling of the 'Exul sacerdos' name.

Borrow's romance and William Taylor's love of paradox would
doubtless often run together, like a pair of well-matched
steeds, and carry them away in the same direction. But there
was a strong--almost wild--_religious_ sentiment in Borrow, of
which only faint traces appear in W. T. In Borrow it had always
a tendency to pass from a sympathetic to an antipathetic form.
He used to gather about him three or four favourite
schoolfellows, after they had learned their class lesson and
before the class was called up, and with a sheet of pape