To George Borrow, Esq., Oulton Hall, Lowestoft.
123 Parliament Street,
Grosvenor Square, Feb. 17, 1845.
Dear Borrow,—El hombre propose pero Dios es que dispose. I had hope to have run down and seen you and yours in your quiet Patmos; but the Sangrados will it otherwise. I have never been quite free from a tickling pain since the bronchitis of last year, and it has recently assumed the form of extreme relaxation and irritation in the uvula, which is that pendulous appendage which hangs over the orifice of the throat. Mine has become so seriously elongated that, after submitting for four days last week to its being burnt with caustic every morning in the hopes that it might thus crimp and contract itself, I have been obliged to have it amputated. This has left a great soreness, which militates against talking and deglutition, and would render our charming chats after the Madeira over la cheminea del cueldo inadvisable. I therefore defer the visit: my Sangrado recommends me, when the summer advances, to fly away into change of air, change of scene; in short, must seek an hejira as you made. How strange the coincidence! but those who have wandered much about require periodical migration, as the encaged quail twice a year beats its breast against the wires.
I am not quite determined where to go, whether to Scotland and the sweet heath-aired hills, or to the wild rocks and clear trout streams of the Tyrol; it is a question between the gun and the rod. If I go north assuredly si Dios quiere I will take your friendly and peaceful abode in my way.
As to my immediate plans I can say nothing before Thursday, when the Sangrado is to report on some diagnosis which he expects.
Meanwhile Handbook is all but out, and Lockhart and Murray are eager to have you in the Q. R. I enclose you a note from the editor. How feel you inclined? I would send you down 30 sheets, and you might run your eye through them. There are plums in the pudding.
Richard Ford.
A proof in slip form of the rejected review, with Borrow's corrections written upon it, is in my possession. Our author pictures Gibraltar as a human entity thus addressing Spain:
Accursed land! I hate thee, and far from being a defence, will invariably prove a thorn in thy side.
And so on through many sentences of excited rhetoric. Borrow forgot while he wrote that he had a book to review—a book, moreover, issued by the publishing house which issued the periodical in which his review was to appear. And this book was a book in ten thousand—a veritable mine of information and out of the way learning. Surely this slight reference amid many dissertations of his own upon Spain was to damn his friend's book with faint praise:
A Handbook is a Handbook after all, a very useful thing, but still—the fact is that we live in an age of humbug, in which everything, to obtain note and reputation, must depend less upon its own intrinsic merit than on the name it bears. The present book is about one of the best books ever written upon Spain; but we are afraid that it will never be estimated at its proper value; for after all a Handbook is a Handbook.
Yet successful as was Ford's Handbook, it is doubtful but that Borrow was right in saying that it had better have been called Wanderings in Spain or Wonders of the Peninsula. How much more gracious was the statement of another great authority on Spain—Sir William Stirling-Maxwell—who said that 'so great a literary achievement had never before been performed under so humble a title.' The article, however, furnishes a trace of autobiography in the statement by Borrow that he had long been in the habit of reading Don Quixote once every nine years. Yet he tells us that he prefers Le Sage's Gil Blas to Don Quixote, 'the characters introduced being certainly more true to nature.' But altogether we do not wonder that Lockhart declined to publish the article. Here is the last letter in my possession; after this there is one in the Knapp collection dated 1851, acknowledging a copy of Lavengro, in which Ford adds: 'Mind when you come to see the Exhibition you look in here, for I long to have a chat,' and so the friendship appears to have collapsed as so many friendships do. Ford died at Heavitree in 1858: