d times'! I
have heard Dr. M. say that not for another life would he go
through the misery he suffered as 'town boy' at that school.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who lived next door to Borrow in Hereford
Square, Brompton, in the 'sixties, as we shall see later, has a word to
say on the point:

Dr. Martineau once told me that he and Borrow had been
schoolfellows at Norwich some sixty years before. Borrow had
persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers'
tills, and then the party set forth to join some smugglers on
the coast. By degrees the truants all fell out of line and were
picked up, tired and hungry, along the road, and brought back
to Norwich School, where condign chastisement awaited them.
George Borrow, it seems, received his large share _horsed_ on
James Martineau's back! The early connection between the two
old men, as I knew them, was irresistibly comic to my mind.
Somehow when I asked Mr. Borrow once to come and meet some
friends at our house he accepted our invitation as usual, but,
on finding that Dr. Martineau was to be of the party, hastily
withdrew his acceptance on a transparent excuse; nor did he
ever after attend our little assemblies without first
ascertaining that Dr. Martineau was not to be present.[43]

James Martineau died in 1900, but the last of Borrow's schoolfellows to
die was, I think, Mr. William Edmund Image, a Justice of the Peace and
Deputy Lieutenant for Suffolk. He resided at Herringswell House, near
Mildenhall, where he died in 1903, aged 96 years.

Mr. Valpy of the Norwich Grammar School is scarcely to be blamed that he
was not able to make separate rules for a quite abnormal boy. Yet, if
he could have known, Borrow was better employed playing truant and
living up to his life-work as a glorified vagabond than in studying in
the ordinary school routine. George Borrow belonged to a type of
boy--there are many such--who learn much more out of school than in its
bounds; and the boy Borrow, picking up brother vagabonds in Tombland
Fair, and already beginning, in his own peculiar way, his language
craze, was laying the foundations that made _Lavengro_ possible.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] In earlier times we have the names of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of
Canterbury; Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice; John Caius, the founder of
Caius College, Cambridge; and Samuel Clarke, divine and metaphy