My dear Carreta,—I just write you a line to inform you that I have got back safe here from the Land's End. I have received your two letters, and hope you received mine from the Land's End. It is probable that I shall yet visit one or two places before I leave Cornwall. I am very much pleased with the country. When you receive this if you please to write a line by return of post I think you may; the Trethinnick people wish me to stay with them for a day or two. When you see the Cobbs pray remember me to them; I am sorry Horace has lost his aunt, he will miss her. Love to Hen. Ever yours, dearest,
G. Borrow.
(Keep this.)
One of Borrow's biographers, Mr. Walling, has given us the best account of that journey through Cornwall,[180] and his explanation of why Borrow did not write the Cornish book that he caused to be advertised in a fly-leaf of The Romany Rye, by the discouragement arising out of the dire failure of that book, may be accepted.[181] Borrow would have made a beautiful book upon Cornwall. Even the title, Penquite and Pentyre; or, The Head of the Forest and the Headland, has music in it. And he had in these twenty weeks made himself wonderfully well acquainted not only with the topography of the principality, but with its folklore and legend. The gulf that ever separated the Borrow of the notebook and of the unprepared letter from the Borrow of the finished manuscript was extraordinary, and we may deplore with Mr. Walling the absence of this among Borrow's many unwritten books.
Borrow was back in Yarmouth at the end of February 1854—he had not fled the country as Dalrymple had suggested—but in July he was off again for his great tour in Wales, in which he was accompanied by his wife and daughter. Of that tour we must treat in another and later chapter, for Wild Wales was not published until 1862. The year following his great tour in Wales he went on a trip to the Isle of Man.
FOOTNOTES:
[178] It is thus that an old schoolfellow, Dalrymple, describes the episode in a fragment of manuscript in the possession of Mrs. James Stuart of Carrow Abbey, from which I have already quoted:
'In 1850/2/3 Borrow lived at Yarmouth; he here made rather a ludicrous exhibition of himself on the occasion of a wreck, when he ran into the sea through a full tide up to his knees, with the utmost apparent heroism, and retreated again as soon as he thought it might be dangerous. He incurred so much ridicule that he abruptly quitted the town, and I have not heard since of him.'
[179] Knapp's Life, vol. ii. p. 97. Letter from Mrs. Robert Taylor to Mrs. Wilkey.
[180] George Borrow, The Man and His Work. By R. A. J. Walling. Cassell, 1908.