A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell with the view of translating it for the Press. His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity; indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and, though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; he would like to get into the Office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.
Although this was the last letter to Southey that is published in the memoir, Taylor visited Southey at Keswick in 1826. Taylor’s three volumes of the Historic Survey of German Poetry appeared in 1828, 1829, and 1830. Sir Walter Scott, in the last year of his life, wrote from Abbotsford on 23rd April, 1832, to Taylor to protest against an allusion to “William Scott of Edinburgh” being the author of a translation of Goetz von Berlichingen. Scott explained that he (Walter Scott) was that author, and also made allusion to the fact that he had borrowed with acknowledgment two lines from Taylor’s Lenore for his own—
Tramp, tramp along the land,
Splash, splash across the sea,
adding that his recollection of the obligation was infinitely stronger than of the mistake. It would seem, however, that the name “William” was actually on the title-page of the London edition of 1799 of Goetz von Berlichingen. When Southey heard of the death of Taylor in 1836 he wrote:
I was not aware of my old friend’s illness, or I should certainly have written to him, to express that unabated regard which I have felt for him eight-and-thirty years, and that hope which I shall ever feel, that we may meet in the higher state of existence. I have known very few who equalled him in talents—none who had a kinder heart; and there never lived a more dutiful son, or a sincerer friend.
Taylor’s many books are now all forgotten. His translation of Bürger’s Lenore one now only recalls by its effect upon Scott; his translation of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise has been superseded. His voluminous Historic Survey of German Poetry only lives through Carlyle’s severe review in the Edinburgh Review [42] against the many strictures in which Taylor’s biographer attempts to defend him. Taylor had none of Carlyle’s inspiration. Not a line of his work survives in print in our day, but it was no small thing to have been the friend and correspondent of Southey, whose figure in literary history looms larger now than it did when Emerson asked contemptuously, “Who’s Southey?”; and to have been the wise mentor of George Borrow is in itself to be no small thing in the record of letters. There is a considerable correspondence between Taylor and Sir Richard Phillips in Robberds’s Memoir, and Phillips seemed always anxious to secure articles from Taylor for the Monthly, and even books for his publishing-house. Hence the introduction from Taylor that Borrow carried to London might have been most effective if Phillips had had any use for poor and impracticable would-be authors.
CHAPTER VI
At the Norwich Grammar School
When George Borrow first entered Norwich after the long journey from Edinburgh, Joseph John Gurney, born 1788, was twenty-six years of age, and William Taylor, born 1765, was forty-nine. Borrow was eleven years of age. Captain Borrow took temporary lodgings at the Crown and Angel Inn in St. Stephen’s Street, George was sent to the Grammar School, and his elder brother started to learn drawing and painting with John Crome (“Old Crome”) of many a fine landscape. But the wanderings of the family were not yet over. Napoleon escaped from Elba, and the West Norfolk Militia were again put on the march. This time it was Ireland to which they were destined, and we have already shadowed forth, with the help of Lavengro, that momentous episode. The victory of Waterloo gave Europe peace, and in 1816 the Borrow family returned to Norwich, there to pass many quiet years. In 1819 Captain Borrow was pensioned—eight shillings a day. From 1816 till his father’s death in 1824 Borrow lived in Norwich with his family. Their home was in King’s Court, Willow Lane, a modest one-storey house in a cul-de-sac, which we have already described. In King’s Court, Willow Lane, Borrow lived at intervals until his marriage in 1840, and his mother continued to live in the house until, in 1849, she agreed to join her son and daughter-in-law at Oulton. Yet the house comes little into the story of Borrow’s life, as do the early houses of many great men of letters, nor do subsequent houses come into his story; the house at Oulton and the house at Hereford Square are equally barren of association; the broad highway and the windy heath were Borrow’s natural home. He was never a “civilised” being; he never shone in drawing-rooms. Let us, however, return to Borrow’s school-days, of which the records are all too scanty, and not in the least invigorating. The Norwich Grammar School has an interesting tradition. We pass to the cathedral through the beautiful Erpingham Gate built about 1420 by Sir Thomas Erpingham, and we find the school on the left. It was originally a chapel, and the porch is at least five hundred years old. The schoolroom is sufficiently old-world-looking for us to imagine the schoolboys of past generations sitting at the various desks. The school was founded in 1547, but the registers have been lost, and so we know little of its famous pupils of earlier days. Lord Nelson and Rajah Brooke are the two names of men of action that stand out most honourably in modern times among the scholars. In literature Borrow had but one schoolfellow, who afterwards came to distinction—James Martineau. Borrow’s headmaster was the Reverend Edward Valpy, who held the office from 1810 to 1829, and to whom is credited the destruction of the school archives. Borrow’s two years of the Grammar School were not happy ones. Borrow, as we have shown, was not of the stuff of which happy schoolboys are made. He had been a wanderer—Scotland, Ireland, and many parts of England had assisted in a fragmentary education; he was now thirteen years of age, and already a vagabond at heart. But let us hear Dr. Augustus Jessopp, who was headmaster of the same Grammar School from 1859 to 1879. Writing of a meeting of old Norvicensians to greet the Rajah, Sir James Brooke, in 1858, when there was a great “whip” of the “old boys,” Dr. Jessopp tells us that Borrow, then living at Yarmouth, did not put in an appearance among his schoolfellows:
My belief is that he never was popular among them, that he never attained a high place in the school, and he was a “free boy.” In those days there were a certain number of day boys at Norwich school, who were nominated by members of the Corporation, and who paid no tuition fees; they had to submit to a certain amount of snubbing at the hands of the boarders, who for the most part were the sons of the county gentry. Of course, such a proud boy as George Borrow would resent this, and it seems to have rankled with him all through his life. . . . To talk of Borrow as a “scholar” is absurd. “A picker-up of learning’s crumbs” he was, but he was absolutely without any of the training or the instincts of a scholar. He had had little education till he came to Norwich, and was at the Grammar School little more than two years. It is pretty certain that he knew no Greek when he entered there, and he never seems to have acquired more than the elements of that language.
Yet the only real influence that Borrow carried away from the Grammar School was concerned with foreign languages. He did take to the French master and exiled priest, Thomas d’Eterville, a native of Caen, who had emigrated to Norwich in 1793. D’Eterville taught French, Italian, and apparently, to Borrow, a little Spanish; and Borrow, with his wonderful memory, must have been his favourite pupil. In the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Lavengro he is pleasantly described by his pupil, who adds, with characteristic “bluff,” that d’Eterville said “on our arrival at the conclusion of Dante’s Hell, ‘vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher.’”