ay residence within three to ten
miles of London.' There is no doubt that a succession of winters on
Oulton Broad had been very detrimental to Mrs. Borrow's health, although
they had no effect upon Borrow, who bathed there with equal indifference
in winter as in summer, having, as he tells us in _Wild Wales_, 'always
had the health of an elephant.' And so Borrow and his wife arrived in
London in June, and took temporary lodgings at 21 Montagu Street,
Portman Square. In September they went into occupation of a house in
Brompton--22 Hereford Square, which is now commemorated by a County
Council tablet. Here Borrow resided for fourteen years, and here his
wife died on January 30, 1869. She was buried in Brompton Cemetery,
where Borrow was laid beside her twelve years later. For neighbour, on
the one side, the Borrows had Mr. Robert Collinson and, on the other,
Miss Frances Power Cobbe and her companion, Miss M. C. Lloyd. From Miss
Cobbe we have occasional glimpses of Borrow, all of them unkindly. She
was of Irish extraction, her father having been grandson of Charles
Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin. Miss Cobbe was an active woman in all kinds
of journalistic and philanthropic enterprises in the London of the
'seventies and 'eighties of the last century, writing in particular in
the now defunct newspaper, the _Echo_, and she wrote dozens of books and
pamphlets, all of them forgotten except her _Autobiography_,[231] in
which she devoted several pages to her neighbour in Hereford Square.
Borrow had no sympathy with fanatical women with many 'isms,' and the
pair did not agree, although many neighbourly courtesies passed between
them for a time. Here is an extract from Miss Cobbe's _Autobiography_:

George Borrow, who, if he were not a gypsy by blood, _ought_ to
have been one, was for some years our near neighbour in
Hereford Square. My friend[232] was amused by his quaint
stories and his (real or sham) enthusiasm for Wales, and
cultivated his acquaintance. I never liked him, thinking him
more or less of a hypocrite. His missions, recorded in _The
Bible in Spain_, and his translations of the Scriptures into
the out-of-the-way tongues, for which he had a gift, were by no
means consonant with his real opinions concerning the veracity
of the said Bible.

One only needs to quote this by the light of the story as told so far in
these pages to see how entirely Miss Cobbe misunderstood Bo