an who, in a conversation not reported to the Bible
Society, said: "What befalls my body or soul was written in a _gabicote_
a thousand years before the foundation of the world."

Borrow was only seven weeks in getting so far as to be able to translate
from Manchu, though it had been said, as he pointed out, that the
language took five or six years to acquire. It cost him an even shorter
time to acquire the dialect of his employers, for in less than a month
after he had retired to Norwich to learn Manchu, he was writing thus:

"Revd. and Dear Sir,--I have just received your communication, and
notwithstanding it is Sunday morning, and the bells with their loud and
clear voices are calling me to church, I have sat down to answer it by
return of post. . . .

"Return my kind and respected friend, Mr. Brandram, my best thanks for
his present of 'The Gypsies' Advocate,' and assure him that, next to the
acquirement of Mandchou, the conversion and enlightening of those
interesting people occupy the principal place in my mind. . . . {130}

Never had his linguistic power a greater or more profitable triumph than
in this acquisition. As this was probably a dialect not unknown at
Earlham, Norwich, and Oulton, among people whom he loved, respected, or
beheld successful, the difficulty of the task was a little decreased.
Thurtell and Haggart had passed away, Petulengro had not yet reappeared.
There was no one to tell him that he was living in a country and an age
that were afterwards to appear among the most ignorant and cruel on
record. He himself had not yet discovered the "gentility-nonsense," nor
did he ever discover that gentility was of the same family, if it was not
an albinism of the same species, as pious and oily respectability. So
delighted was he with the new dialect that he rolled it on his tongue to
the confusion of habitues, who had to rap him over the knuckles for
speaking of becoming "useful to the Deity, to man, and to himself."

In July, 1833, Borrow was appointed, with a salary of 200 pounds a year
and expenses, to go to St. Petersburg, to help in editing a Manchu
translation of the New Testament, or transcribing and collating a
translation of the Old, accompanied by a warning against "a tone of
confidence in speaking of yourself" in such a phrase as "useful to the
Deity, to man, and to yourself." Borrow accepted the correction, and
Norwich laughed at him in his new suit. At the end of July he sailed,
an