George Borrow in East Anglia

Transcribed from the 1896 David Nutt edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
A few passages in this monograph are taken from a short article on “ George Borrow ” which appeared in “ Good Words .”
W. A. D.
by WILLIAM A. DUTT
“The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? . . . The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. Let us demand our own works, and laws, and worship.”—Emerson.
london DAVID NUTT, 270–271, STRAND 1896
“ Apart from Borrow’s undoubted genius as a writer , the subject-matter of his writings has an interest that will not wane , but will go on growing . The more the features of our ‘ Beautiful England ,’ to use his own phrase , are changed by the multitudinous effects of the railway system , the more attraction will readers find in books which depict her before her beauty was marred — books which picture her in those antediluvian days when there was such a thing as space in the island — when in England there was a sense of distance , that sense without which there can be no romance — when the stage-coach was in its glory , when the only magician that could convey man and his belongings at any rate of speed beyond man’s own walking rate was the horse — the beloved horse whose praises Borrow loved to sing , and whose ideal was reached in the mighty ‘ Shales ’— when the great high roads were alive , not merely with the bustle of business , but with real adventure for the traveller — days and scenes which Borrow , better than any one else , could paint .”
Theodore Watts.
It is a trite saying, the truth of which is so universally admitted that it is hardly worth repeating, that a man’s memory, above all things, retains most vividly recollections of the scenes amidst which he passed his early days. Amidst the loneliness of the African veldt or American prairie solitudes, the West-countryman dreams of Devon’s grassy tors and honeysuckle lanes, and Cornish headlands, fretted by the foaming waves of the grey Atlantic; in teaming cities, where the pulse of life beats loud and strong, the Scotsman ever cherishes sweet, sad thoughts of the braes and burns about his Highland home; between the close-packed roofs of a London alley, the Italian immigrant sees the sunny skies and deep blue seas of his native land, the German pictures to himself the loveliness of the legend-haunted Rhineland, and the Scandinavian, closing his eyes and ears to the squalor and misery,