stories of his crushing remarks prove nothing but that he was big and alarming and uncontrolled.
Very little record of his friendly intercourse with men at this middle period remains. Several letters, of 1853, 1856 and 1857, alone survive to show that he met and received letters from Fitzgerald. That Fitzgerald enjoyed an evening with him in 1856 tells us little; and even so it appears that Fitzgerald only wanted to ask him to read some of the “Northern Ballads”—“but you shut the book”—and that he doubted whether Borrow wished to keep up the acquaintance. They had friends in common, and Fitzgerald had sent Borrow a copy of his “Six Dramas of Calderon,” in 1853, confessing that he had had thoughts of sending the manuscript first for an inspection. He also told Borrow when he was about to make the “dangerous experiment” of marriage with Miss Barton “of Quaker memory.” In 1857 Borrow came to see him and had the loan of the “Rubaiyat” in manuscript, and Fitzgerald showed his readiness to see more of the “Great Man.” In 1859 he sent Borrow a copy of “Omar.” He found Borrow’s “masterful manners and irritable temper uncongenial,” [{209}] but succeeded, unlike many other friends, in having no quarrel with him. Near the end of his life, in 1875, it was Borrow that tried to renew the acquaintance, but in vain, for Fitzgerald reminded him that friends “exist and enjoy themselves pretty reasonably without me,” and asked, was not being alone better than having company?
If Borrow had little consideration for others’ feelings, his consideration for his own was exquisite, as this story, belonging to 1856, may help to prove:
“There were three personages in the world whom he always had a desire to see; two of these had slipped through his fingers, so he was determined to see the third.
‘Pray, Mr. Borrow, who were they?’ He held up three fingers of his left hand and pointed them off with the forefinger of the right: the first, Daniel O’Connell; the second, Lamplighter (the sire of Phosphorus, Lord Berners’s winner of the Derby); the third, Anna Gurney. . . .”
One spring day during the Crimean War, when he was walking round Norfolk, he sent word to Anna Gurney to announce his coming, and she was ready to receive him.
“When, according to his account, he had been but a very short time in her presence, she wheeled her chair round and reached her hand to one of her bookshelves and took down an Arabic Grammar, and put it into his hand, asking for explanation of some difficult point, which he tried to decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously; when, said he, ‘I could not study the Arabic Grammar and listen to her at the same time, so I threw down the book and ran out of the room.’ He seems not to have stopped running till he reached Old Tucker’s Inn, at Cromer, where he renewed his strength, or calmed his temper, with five excellent sausages, and then came on to Sheringham. . . .” [{210a}]
The distance is a very good two miles, and Borrow’s age was forty-nine.
He is said also to have been considerate towards his mother, the poor, and domestic animals. Probably he and his mother understood one another. When he could not write to her, he got his wife to do so; and from 1849 she lived with them at Oulton. As to the poor, Knapp tells us that he left behind him letters of gratitude or acknowledgment from individuals, churches, and chapels. As to animals, once when he came upon some men beating a horse that had fallen, he gave it ale of sufficient quantity and strength to set it soon upon the road trotting with the rest of its kind, after the men had received a lecture. [{210b}] It is