reek and Latin scholar, but acquainted
with French, Italian, and Spanish, all the Celtic and Gothic dialects,
and likewise with the peculiar language of the English Romany Chals or
Gypsies. This speech or jargon, amounting to about eleven hundred and
twenty-seven words, he had picked up amongst the wandering tribes with
whom he had formed acquaintance on Mousehold, a wild heath near Norwich,
where they were in the habit of encamping. By the time his clerkship was
expired his father was dead, and he had little to depend upon but the
exercise of his abilities such as they were. In 1823 he betook himself
to London, and endeavoured to obtain a livelihood by literature. For
some time he was a hack author, doing common work for booksellers. For
one in particular he prepared an edition of the Newgate Calendar, from
the careful study of which he has often been heard to say that he first
learned to write genuine English. His health failed, he left London, and
for a considerable time he lived a life of roving adventure.

[4] Knapp's _Life of Borrow_, vol. i. p. 6.

[5] The writer recalls at his own school at Downham Market in Norfolk an
old Crimean Veteran--Serjeant Canham--drilling the boys each week, thus
supplementing his income precisely in the same manner as did Serjeant
Borrow.

[6] The date has always hitherto been wrongly given. I find it in one of
Ann Borrow's notebooks, but although every vicar of every parish in
Chelmsford and Colchester has searched the registers for me, with
agreeable courtesy, I cannot discover a record of John's birthplace, and
am compelled to the belief that Dr. Knapp was wrong in suggesting one or
other of these towns.

[7] _Lavengro_, ch. xiv.

[8] _Lavengro_, ch. xxiii.

CHAPTER II

BORROW'S MOTHER

Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who seems to
have developed into a woman of great strength of character far remote
from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young soldier at East
Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century. We would gladly
know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement. Her father was a
farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have already described. He did
not, however, 'farm his own little estate' as Borrow declared. The
grandfather--a French Protestant--came, if we are to believe Borrow,
from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but
there is no documentary evidence to support the contention.