g
morass, and going up to the fellow who was noisiest and bragged most of
his bridal gift, she said, 'What will you give to Lady Boe?' The boor,
who was half intoxicated from the brandy and ale he had swallowed, seized
a whip, and answered, 'Three strokes of my waggon-whip.' But at the same
moment he fell a corpse to the ground."

If translation like this is journeyman's work for the journeyman, for
Borrow it was of great value because it familiarised him with the
marvellous and the supernatural and so helped him towards the expression
of his own material and spiritual adventures. The wild and often other-
worldly air of much of his work is doubtless due to his wild and other-
worldly mind, but owes a considerable if uncertain debt to his reading of
ballads and legends, which give a little to the substance of his work and
far more to the tone of it. Among other things translated at this time
he mentions the "Saga of Burnt Njal."

He was not happy in London. He had few friends there, and perhaps those
he had only disturbed without sweetening his solitude. One of these was
a Norwich friend, named Roger Kerrison, who shared lodgings with him at
16, Millman Street, Bedford Row. Borrow confided in Kerrison, and had
written to him before leaving Norwich in terms of perhaps unconsciously
worked-up affection. But Borrow's low spirits in London were more than
Kerrison could stand. When Borrow was proposing a short visit to Norwich
his friend wrote to John Thomas Borrow, suggesting that he should keep
his brother there for a time, or else return with him, for this reason.
Borrow had "repeatedly" threatened suicide, and unable to endure his fits
of desperation Kerrison had gone into separate lodgings: if his friend
were to return in this state and find himself alone he would "again make
some attempt to destroy himself." Nothing was done, so far as is known,
and he did not commit suicide. It is a curious commentary on the work of
hack writers that this youth should have written as a note to his
translation of "The Suicide's Grave," {85} that it was not translated for
its sentiments but for its poetry; "although the path of human life is
rough and thorny, the mind may always receive consolation by looking
forward to the world to come. The mind which rejects a future state has
to thank itself for its utter misery and hopelessness." His malady was
youth, aggravated, the food reformer would say, by eating fourteen
pennywo