To George Borrow

Parliament St., 17 June 1826.

My dear Sir,—I am very much obliged to you for the opportunity that you have afforded me of perusing your spirited and faithful translating of the Danish ballads. Mr. Allan Cunningham, who, as you will know, is an ancient minstrel himself, says that they are more true to the originals and more truly poetical than any that he has yet seen. I have delivered one copy to Mr. Lockhart, the new editor of the Quarterly Review, and I hope he will notice it as it deserves. Murray would probably be inclined to publish your translations.—I remain, dear sir, your obedient and faithful servant,

Francis Palgrave.

It is probable that he did also send a copy to Scott, and it is Dr. Knapp's theory that 'that busy writer forgot to acknowledge the courtesy.' It may be that this is so. It has been the source of many a literary prejudice. Carlyle had a bitterness in his heart against Scott for much the same cause. Rarely indeed can the struggling author endure to be ignored by the radiantly successful one. It must have been the more galling in that a few years earlier Scott had been lifted by the ballad from obscurity to fame. Borrow did not in any case lack encouragement from Allan Cunningham: 'I like your Danish ballads much,' he writes. 'Get out of bed, George Borrow, and be sick or sleepy no longer. A fellow who can give us such exquisite Danish ballads has no right to repose.'[64] Borrow, on his side, thanks Cunningham for his 'noble lines,' and tells him that he has got 'half of his Songs of Scotland by heart.'

Five hundred copies of the Romantic Ballads were printed in Norwich by S. Wilkin, about two hundred being subscribed for, mainly in that city, the other three hundred being dispatched to London—to Taylor, whose name appears on the London title-page, although he seems to have passed on the book very quickly to Wightman and Cramp, for what reason we are not informed. Borrow tells us that the two hundred subscriptions of half a guinea 'amply paid expenses,' but he must have been cruelly disappointed, as he was doomed to be more than once in his career, by the lack of public appreciation outside of Norwich. Yet there were many reasons for this. If Scott had made the ballad popular, he had also destroyed it for a century—perhaps for ever—by substituting the novel as the favourite medium for the storyteller. Great ballads we were to have in every decade from that day to this, but never another 'best seller' like Marmion or The Lady of the Lake. Our popular poets had to express themselves in other ways. Then Borrow, although his verse has been underrated by those who have not seen it at its best, or who are incompetent to appraise poetry, was not very effective here, notwithstanding that the stories in verse in Romantic Ballads are all entirely interesting. This fact is most in evidence in a case where a real poet, not of the greatest, has told the same story. We owe a rendering of 'The Deceived Merman' to both George Borrow and Matthew Arnold, but how widely different the treatment! The story is of a merman who rose out of the water and enticed a mortal—fair Agnes or Margaret—under the waves; she becomes his wife, bears him children, and then asks to return to earth. Arriving there she refuses to go back when the merman comes disconsolately to the churchdoor for her. Here are a few lines from the two versions, which demonstrate that here at least Borrow was no poet and that Arnold was a very fine one:

GEORGE BORROW	MATTHEW ARNOLD
'Now, Agnes, Agnes list to me,	We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with rains,
Thy babes are longing so after thee.'	And we gazed up the aisles through the small leaded panes.
'I cannot come yet, here must I stay	She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear:
Until the priest shall have said his say,'	'Margaret, hist! come quick we are here!
And when the priest had said his say,	Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long alone;
She thought with her mother at home she'd stay.	The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan,'
'O Agnes, Agnes list to me,	But, ah, she gave me never a look,
Thy babes are sorrowing after thee,'	For her eyes were sealed on the holy book!
'Let them sorrow and sorrow their fill,	Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
But back to them never return I will.'	Come away, children, call no more!
	Come away, come down, call no more!

It says much for the literary proclivities of Norwich at this period that Borrow should have had so kindly a reception for his book as the subscription list implies. At the end of each of Wilkin's two hundred copies a 'list of subscribers' is given. It opens with the name of the Bishop of Norwich, Dr. Bathurst; it includes the equally familiar names of the Gurdons, Gurneys, Harveys, Rackhams, Hares (then as now of Stow Hall), Woodhouses—all good Norfolk or Norwich names that have come down to our time. Mayor Hawkes, who is made famous in Lavengro by Haydon's portrait, is there also. Among London names we find 'F. Arden,' which recalls his friend 'Francis Ardry' in Lavengro, John Bowring, Borrow's new friend, and later to be counted an enemy, Thomas Campbell, Benjamin Haydon, and John Timbs, But the name that most strikes the eye is that of 'Thurtell.' Three of the family are among the subscribers, including Mr. George Thurtell of Eaton, near Norwich, brother of the murderer; there also is the name of John Thurtell, executed for murder exactly a year before. This would seem to imply that Borrow had been a long time collecting these names and subscriptions, and doubtless before the all-too-famous crime of the previous year he had made Thurtell promise to become a subscriber, and, let us hope, had secured his half-guinea. That may account, with so sensitive and impressionable a man as our author, for the kindly place that Weare's unhappy murderer always had in his memory. Borrow, in any case, was now, for a few years, to become more than ever a vagabond. Not a single further appeal did he make to an unsympathetic literary public for a period of five years at least.