tary conversation was a late
prize-fight: 'Oh, pity it was that ever corruption should have crept in
amongst them'--she had just been reading _Lavengro_.

[78] _Pugilistica_, vol. i. 69.

[79] _Lavengro_, ch. i.

CHAPTER XIII

EIGHT YEARS OF VAGABONDAGE

There has been much nonsense written concerning what has been called the
'veiled period' of George Borrow's life. This has arisen from a letter
which Richard Ford of the _Handbook for Travellers in Spain_ wrote to
Borrow after a visit to him at Oulton in 1844. Borrow was full of his
projected _Lavengro_, the idea of which he outlined to his friends. He
was a genial man in those days, on the wave of a popular success.
Was not _The Bible in Spain_ passing merrily from edition to
edition! Borrow, it is clear, told Ford that he was writing his
'Autobiography'--he had no misgiving then as to what he should call
it--and he evidently proposed to end it in 1825 and not in 1833, when
the Bible Society gave him his real chance in life. Ford begged him, in
letters that came into Dr. Knapp's possession, and from which he quotes
all too meagrely, not to 'drop a curtain' over the eight years
succeeding 1825. 'No doubt,' says Ford, 'it will excite a mysterious
interest,' but then he adds in effect it will lead to a wrong
construction being put upon the omission. Well, there can be but one
interpretation, and that not an unnatural one. Borrow had a very rough
time during these eight years. His vanity was hurt, and no wonder. It
seems a small matter to us now that Charles Dickens should have been
ashamed of the blacking-bottle episode of his boyhood. Genius has a
right to a penurious, and even to a sordid, boyhood. But genius has no
right to a sordid manhood, and here was George 'Olaus' Borrow, who was
able to claim the friendship of William Taylor, the German scholar; who
was able to boast of his association with sound scholastic foundations,
with the High School at Edinburgh and the Grammar School at Norwich; who
was a great linguist and had made rare translations from the poetry of
many nations, starving in the byways of England and of France. What a
fate for such a man that he should have been so unhappy for eight years;
should have led the most penurious of roving lives, and almost certainly
have been in prison as a common tramp.[80] It was all very well to
romance about a poverty-stricken youth. But when youth had fled there
ceased to be romance, and only sordidness