in 1831. Thus he was going home in despair, but
seems to have had good talk on the way with Borrow in St. Petersburg. In
1845 his complete Old Testament in Persian appeared in Edinburgh. This
William Glen has been confused with another William Glen, a law student,
who taught Carlyle Greek, but they had nothing in common. Borrow and
Carlyle could not possibly have had friends in common. Borrow was drawn
towards this William Glen by his enthusiasm for the Persian language.
But Glen departed out of his life very quickly. Hasfeld, who entered it
about the same time, was to stay longer. Hasfeld was a Dane, now
thirty-three years of age, who, after a period in the Foreign Office at
Copenhagen, had come to St. Petersburg as an interpreter to the Danish
Legation, but made quite a good income as a professor of European
languages in cadet schools and elsewhere. The English language and
literature would seem to have been his favourite topic. His friendship
for Borrow was a great factor in Borrow's life in Russia and elsewhere.
If Borrow's letters to Hasfeld should ever turn up, they will prove the
best that he wrote. Hasfeld's letters to Borrow were preserved by him.
Three of them are in my possession. Others were secured by Dr. Knapp,
who made far too little use of them. They are all written in Danish on
foreign notepaper: flowery, grandiloquent productions we may admit, but
if we may judge a man by his correspondents, we have a revelation of a
more human Borrow than the correspondence with the friends at Earl
Street reveals:

ST. PETERSBURG, _6/18 November 1836._

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Much water has run through the Neva since I
last wrote to you, my last letter was dated 5/17th April; the
last letter I received from you was dated Madrid, 23rd May, and
I now see with regret that it is still unanswered; it is,
however, a good thing that I have not written as often to you
as I have thought about you, for otherwise you would have
received a couple of letters daily, because the sun never sets
without you, my lean friend, entering into my imagination. I
received the Spanish letter a day or two before I left for
Stockholm, and it made the journey with me, for it was in my
mind to send you an epistle from Svea's capital, but there were
so many petty hindrances that I was nearly forgetting myself,
let alone correspondence. I lived in Stockholm as if each day