Margaret's, Lowestoft, who had
married a sister of the Quaker banker, Joseph John Gurney, and through
the offices of these two, Borrow was invited to go before the British and
Foreign Bible Society, as a candidate for employment in some branch of
the Society's work where his knowledge of languages would be useful. He
walked to London for the purpose in December, 1832. The Society was
satisfied and sent him back to Norwich to learn the Manchu-Tartar
language. There he wrote a letter, which, if we take Dr. Knapp's word
for it, was "a sort of recantation of the Taylorism of 1824." Being now
near thirty, and perhaps having his worst "horrors" behind him, or at
least having reason to think so if he was already fond of Mrs. Clarke,
whom he afterwards married, it was easy for him to fall into the same way
of speaking as these good and kindly people, and to abuse Buddhism, which
he did not understand, for their delectation. Mrs. Clarke had four or
five hundred pounds a year of her own, and one child, a daughter, then
about fourteen years old. Perhaps it was natural that he should remember
then, as he did later, the words of the cheerful and forgetful wise man:
"I have been young and now am grown old, yet never have I seen the
righteous forsaken, or his seed begging bread."

From a gloomily fanatical atheist Borrow changed to a cheerfully
fanatical Protestant, described as "of the middle order in society, and a
very produceable person." {126} He was probably never a good atheist of
the reasonable critical type like William Taylor, whose thinking was too
dull and too difficult for him. Above all it was too negative and
unrelated to anything but the brain for the man who wrote "Lines to Six-
foot-three" and consorted with Gypsies. He had taken atheism along with
Taylor's literary and linguistic teaching, perhaps with some eagerness at
first as a form of protest against conventionally pious and respectable
Norwich life. The Bible Society and Mrs. Clarke and her friends came
radiant and benevolent to his "looped and windowed" atheism. They gave
him friends and money: they gave him an occupation on which he felt, and
afterwards found, that he could spend his hesitating energies. He
gathered up all his powers to serve the Bible Society. He suffered
hunger, cold, imprisonment, wounded feet, long hours of indoor labour and
long hours of dismal attendance upon inexorable official delay.
Personally he irritated Mr. Brandram,