[95] Let me here acknowledge with gratitude my indebtedness to that fine work The History of the British Foreign Bible Society (1904-10, Murray), by William Canton, which is worthy of the accomplished author of The Invisible Playmate. An earlier history of the Society, by the Rev. George Browne, published in 1859, has necessarily been superseded by Mr. Canton's book.
[96] Canton's History of the Bible Society, vol. i. 195.
[97] Ibid., vol. ii. 127.
[98] In Letters from George Borrow to the Bible Society (Hodder and Stoughton), 1911.
[99] See Memoirs of John Venning, Esq., formerly of St. Petersburgh and late of Norwich. With Numerous Notices from his Manuscripts relative to the Imperial Family of Russia. By Thulia S. Henderson. London: Knight and Son, 1862. Borrow's name is not once mentioned, but there is a slight reference to him on pages 148 and 149.
CHAPTER XVI
ST. PETERSBURG AND JOHN P. HASFELD
Borrow travelled by way of Hamburg and Lübeck to Travemünde, whence he went by sea to St. Petersburg, where he arrived on the twentieth of August 1833. He was back in London in September 1835, and thus it will be seen that he spent two years in Russia. After the hard life he had led, everything was now rose-coloured. 'Petersburg is the finest city in the world,' he wrote to Mr. Jowett; 'neither London nor Paris nor any other European capital which I have visited has sufficient pretensions to enter into comparison with it in respect to beauty and grandeur.' But the striking thing about Borrow in these early years was his capacity for making friends. He had not been a week in St. Petersburg before he had gained the regard of one, William Glen, who, in 1825, had been engaged by the Bible Society to translate the Old Testament into Persian. The clever Scot, of whom Borrow was informed by a competent judge that he was 'a Persian scholar of the first water,' was probably too heretical for the Society which recalled him, much to his chagrin. 'He is a very learned man, but of very simple and unassuming manners,' wrote Borrow to Jowett.[100] His version of the Psalms appeared in 1830, and of Proverbs in 1831. Thus he was going home in despair, but seems to have had good talk on the way with Borrow in St. Petersburg. In 1845 his complete Old Testament in Persian appeared in Edinburgh. This William Glen has been confused with another William Glen, a law student, who taught Carlyle Greek, but they had nothing in common. Borrow and Carlyle could not possibly have had friends in common. Borrow was drawn towards this William Glen by his enthusiasm for the Persian language. But Glen departed out of his life very quickly. Hasfeld, who entered it about the same time, was to stay longer. Hasfeld was a Dane, now thirty-three years of age, who, after a period in the Foreign Office at Copenhagen, had come to St. Petersburg as an interpreter to the Danish Legation, but made quite a good income as a professor of European languages in cadet schools and elsewhere. The English language and literature would seem to have been his favourite topic. His friendship for Borrow was a great factor in Borrow's life in Russia and elsewhere. If Borrow's letters to Hasfeld should ever turn up, they will prove the best that he wrote. Hasfeld's letters to Borrow were preserved by him. Three of them are in my possession. Others were secured by Dr. Knapp, who made far too little use of them. They are all written in Danish on foreign notepaper: flowery, grandiloquent productions we may admit, but if we may judge a man by his correspondents, we have a revelation of a more human Borrow than the correspondence with the friends at Earl Street reveals: