He was now, by virtue of his wife, a “landed proprietor,” and filled the part with unction, though but little satisfaction.

For he was not a magistrate, and he had to get up in the middle of the night to look after “poachers and thieves,” as he says in giving a reason for an illness. In the summer-house at Oulton hung his father’s coat and sword, but it is to be noticed that to the end of his life an old friend held it “doubtful whether his father commenced his military career with a commission.” Borrow probably realised the importance of belonging to the ruling classes and having a long steady pedigree. “If report be true,” says the same friend, [{201}] “his mother was of French origin, and in early life an actress.” The foreignness as an asset overcame his objection to the French, and “an actress” also sounded unconventional. The friend continues: “But the subject of his family was one on which Borrow never touched. He would allude to Borrowdale as the country whence they came, and then would make mysterious allusions to his father’s pugilistic triumphs. But this is certain, that he has not left a single relation behind him.” Yet he had many relatives in Cornwall and did not scorn to visit their houses. He would only talk of his works to intimate friends, and “when he went into company it was as a gentleman, not because he was an author.”

Lady Eastlake, in March, 1844, calls him “a fine man, but a most disagreeable one; a kind of character that would be most dangerous in rebellious times—one that would suffer or persecute to the utmost. His face is expressive of wrong-headed determination.”

A little earlier than this, in October, 1843, Caroline Fox saw him “sitting on one side of the fire and his old mother on the other.” It was known to her that “his spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day was very rainy, but he was courteous and not displeased to be a little lionised, for his delicacy is not of the most susceptible.” He was “a tall,

ungainly, uncouth man,” in her opinion, “with great physical strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.” In no place does he make anyone praise his voice, and, as he said, it reminded one Spanish woman of a German clockmaker’s.

But Borrow was not happy or at ease. He took a riding tour in the east of England; he walked, rowed and fished; but that was not enough. He was restless, and yet did not get away. Evidently he did not conceal the fact that he thought of travelling again. He had talked about Africa and China: he was now talking about Constantinople and Africa. He was often miserable, though he had, so far as he knew, “no particular disorder.” If at such times he was away from Oulton, he thought of his home as his only refuge in this world; if he was at home he thought of travel or foreign employment. His disease was, perhaps, now middle age, and too good a memory in his blood and in his bones. Whatever it was it was apparently not curable by his kind of Christianity, nor by a visit from the genial Ford, and a present of caviare and pheasant; nor by the never-out-of-date reminder from friends that he was very well off, etc. If he had been caught by Dissenters, as he should have been, he might by this time have had salvation, and an occupation for life, in founding a new truculent sect of Borrovians. As the Rev. the Romany Rye he might have blazed in an entertaining and becoming manner. As “a sincere member of the old-fashioned Church of England, in which he believes there is more religion, and consequently less cant, than in any other Church in the world,” there was nothing for him to do but sit down at Oulton and contemplate the fact. This and the other fact that “he eats his own bread, and is one of the very few men in England who are independent in every sense of the word,” were afterwards to be made subjects for public rejoicing in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye.”

But in his discontent at the age of forty it cannot have been entirely satisfactory, however flattering, to hear Ford, in the “Edinburgh,” saying:

“We wish he would, on some leisure day, draw up the curtain of his own eventful biography. We collected from his former work that he was not always what he now is. The pursuits and society of his youth scarcely could be denominated, in Troloppian euphemism, la crême de la crême; but they stood him in good stead; then and there was he trained for the encounter of Spain . . . whilst sowing his wild oats, he became passionately fond of horseflesh. . . .

“How much has Mr. Borrow yet to remember, yet to tell! let him not delay. His has been a life, one day of which is more crowded than is the fourscore-year vegetation of a squire or alderman. . . . Everything seems sealed on a memory, wax to receive and marble to retain. He is not subjective. He has the new fault of not talking about self. We vainly want to know what sort of person must be the pilgrim in whose wanderings we have been interested. That he has left to other pens. . . .”

Then Ford went on to identify Borrow with the mysterious Unknown of Colonel Napier’s newly-published book.