Miss Frances Power Cobbe, who lived next door to Borrow in Hereford Square, Brompton, in the 'sixties, as we shall see later, has a word to say on the point:
Dr. Martineau once told me that he and Borrow had been schoolfellows at Norwich some sixty years before. Borrow had persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers' tills, and then the party set forth to join some smugglers on the coast. By degrees the truants all fell out of line and were picked up, tired and hungry, along the road, and brought back to Norwich School, where condign chastisement awaited them. George Borrow, it seems, received his large share horsed on James Martineau's back! The early connection between the two old men, as I knew them, was irresistibly comic to my mind. Somehow when I asked Mr. Borrow once to come and meet some friends at our house he accepted our invitation as usual, but, on finding that Dr. Martineau was to be of the party, hastily withdrew his acceptance on a transparent excuse; nor did he ever after attend our little assemblies without first ascertaining that Dr. Martineau was not to be present.[43]
James Martineau died in 1900, but the last of Borrow's schoolfellows to die was, I think, Mr. William Edmund Image, a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for Suffolk. He resided at Herringswell House, near Mildenhall, where he died in 1903, aged 96 years.
Mr. Valpy of the Norwich Grammar School is scarcely to be blamed that he was not able to make separate rules for a quite abnormal boy. Yet, if he could have known, Borrow was better employed playing truant and living up to his life-work as a glorified vagabond than in studying in the ordinary school routine. George Borrow belonged to a type of boy—there are many such—who learn much more out of school than in its bounds; and the boy Borrow, picking up brother vagabonds in Tombland Fair, and already beginning, in his own peculiar way, his language craze, was laying the foundations that made Lavengro possible.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] In earlier times we have the names of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury; Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice; John Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge; and Samuel Clarke, divine and metaphysician; and, indeed, a very considerable list of England's worthies.
[39] 'Lights on Borrow,' by the Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D. D., Hon. Canon of Norwich Cathedral, in The Daily Chronicle, 30th April 1900.
[40] The whole memorandum on a sheet of notepaper, signed A. D., is in the possession of Mrs. James Stuart of Carrow Abbey, Norwich, who has kindly lent it to me.
[41] This is a contemptuous reference in Martineau's own words to 'George Borrow, the writer and actor of romance,' in the allusion to Martineau's schoolfellows under Edward Valpy. Martineau was at the Norwich Grammar School for four years—from 1815 to 1819. See Life and Letters, by James Drummond and C. B. Upton, vol. i. pp. 16, 17.
[42] Reprint from an article by W. A. Dutt on 'George Borrow and James Martineau' in The Sphere for 30th August 1902. The letter was written to Mr. James Hooper, of Norwich.