of the work
intrusted to our hands.[45]

[Illustration: WILLIAM SIMPSON

From a portrait by Thomas Phillips, R.A.

Mr. Simpson was Chamberlain of the city of Norwich and Treasurer of the
county of Norfolk. He was Town-Clerk of Norwich in 1826, and has an
interest in connection with George Borrow in that Borrow was articled to
him as a lawyer's clerk and describes him in _Wild Wales_ as 'the
greatest solicitor in East Anglia--indeed I may say the prince of all
English solicitors.'

The portrait hangs in the Black Friars Hall, Norwich.]

And he goes on to tell us that he studied the Welsh language and later
the Danish; his master said that his inattention would assuredly make
him a bankrupt, and his father sighed over his eccentric and
impracticable son. The passion for languages had indeed caught hold of
Borrow. Among my Borrow papers I find a memorandum in the handwriting of
his stepdaughter in which she says:

I have often heard his mother say, that when a mere child of
eight or nine years, all his pocket-money was spent in
purchasing foreign Dictionaries and Grammars; he formed an
acquaintance with an old woman who kept a bookstall in the
market-place of Norwich, whose son went voyages to Holland with
cattle, and brought home Dutch books, which were eagerly bought
by little George. One day the old woman was crying, and told
him that her son was in prison. 'For doing what?' asked the
child. 'For taking a silk handkerchief out of a gentleman's
pocket.' 'Then,' said the boy, 'your son stole the pocket
handkerchief?' 'No dear, no, my son did not steal,--he only
glyfaked.'

We have no difficulty in recognising here the heroine of the Moll
Flanders episode in _Lavengro_. But it was not from casual meetings with
Welsh grooms and Danes and Dutchmen that Borrow acquired even such
command of various languages as was undoubtedly his. We have it on the
authority of an old fellow-pupil at the Grammar School, Burcham,
afterwards a London police-magistrate, that William Taylor gave him
lessons in German,[46] but he acquired most of his varied knowledge in
these impressionable years in the Corporation Library of Norwich. Dr.
Knapp found, in his most laudable examination of some of the books,
Borrow's neat pencil notes, the making of which was not laudable on the
part of his hero. One book here marked was on ancient Danish literature,
the author of which, Olaus