the perilous process of concealing the strangeness and the difference.
The result is--or is it an individual misfortune of mine?--that the
figure of "Lavengro" seems to me, more often than not, and on the whole,
to be nearer the age of forty than of twenty. The artist, that is to
say, dominates his subject, the tall overgrown youth of twenty-two, as
grey as a badger. It is very different in "The Bible in Spain," where
artist and subject are equally matched, and both mature. In "Lavengro"
there is a roundabout method, a painful poring subtlety and minuteness, a
marvellous combination of Sterne and Defoe, resulting in something very
little like any book written by either man: in "The Bible in Spain" a
straightforward, confident, unqualified revelation that seems almost
unconsidered.

CHAPTER VIII--CHILDHOOD

And now for some raw bones of the life of a man who was born in 1803 and
died in 1881, bones picked white and dry by the winds of thirty, forty,
fifty, and a hundred years.

Thomas Borrow, his father, an eighth and youngest son, was born in 1758
of a yeoman family long and still settled in Cornwall, near Liskeard. He
worked for some time on his brother's farm. At nineteen he joined the
Militia and was apprenticed to a maltster, but, having knocked his master
down in a free fight at Menheniot Fair in 1783, disappeared and enlisted
as a private in the Coldstream Guards. He was then a man of fresh
complexion and light brown hair, just under five feet eight inches in
height. He was a sergeant when he was transferred nine years later to
the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia. In 1798 he was promoted to the
office of adjutant with the rank of captain. In 1793 he had married Ann
Perfrement, a tenant farmer's daughter from East Dereham, and probably of
French Protestant descent, whom he had first met when she was playing a
minor part as an amateur at East Dereham with a company from the Theatre
Royal at Norwich. She had, says Borrow, dark brilliant eyes, oval face,
olive complexion, and Grecian forehead.

The first child of this marriage, John Thomas, was born in 1800. Borrow
describes this elder brother as a beautiful child of "rosy, angelic face,
blue eyes and light chestnut hair," yet of "not exactly an Anglo-Saxon
countenance," having something of "the Celtic character, particularly in
the fire and vivacity which illumined it." John was his father's
favourite. He entered the army and became a lieuten