hear from me again,
you should have any opportunity to recommend me as a proper
person to fill any civil situation in those countries, or to
attend any expedition thither, I pray you to lay hold of it,
and no conduct of mine shall ever give you reason to repent of
it.--I remain, my dear Sir, your most obliged and obedient
servant,

GEORGE BORROW.

_P.S._--Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Bowring and to
Edgar, and tell them that they will both be starved. There is
now a report in the street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing
within twenty miles of this place. I have lately been wandering
about Norfolk, and I am sorry to say that the minds of the
peasantry are in a horrible state of excitement. I have
repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-field swear that
not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be eaten, and
that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid all
this will end in a famine and a rustic war.

Borrow's next letter to Bowring that has been preserved is dated 1835
and was written from Portugal. With that I will deal when we come to
Borrow's travels in the Peninsula. Here it sufficeth to note that during
the years of Borrow's most urgent need he seems to have found a kind
friend if not a very zealous helper in the 'Old Radical' whom he came to
hate so cordially.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] _Autobiographical Reflections of Sir John Bowring. With a Brief
Memoir by Lewin B. Bowring_. Henry S. King and Co., London, 1877.

[86] _The Romany Rye_ Appendix, ch. xi.

[87] Kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. Wilfred J. Bowring, Sir John
Bowring's grandson. The rights which I hold through the executors of
George Borrow's stepdaughter, Mrs. MacOubrey, over the Borrow
correspondence enable me to publish in their completeness letters which
three previous biographers, all of whom have handled the correspondence,
have published mainly in fragments.

[88] The manuscript of _The Death of Balder_ came into the hands of Mr.
William Jarrold of Norwich through Mr. Webber of Ipswich, who purchased
a large mass of Borrow manuscripts that were sold at Borrow's death,
most of which were re-purchased by Dr. Knapp. His firm, Jarrold and
Sons, issued _The Death of Balder, from the Danish of Johannes Ewald_,
in 1889.

[89] This and the previous letter are undated, but bear the careful
endorsement of Dr. John Bowrin