His melancholy was abated by an unexpected visit from his soldier-artist brother (April 29th, 1824), of whom, after an affectionate embrace, he asked: “How is my mother, and how is the dog?” Old Mrs. Borrow, down in Willow Lane, was getting past her fits of crying over the loss of her husband, and frequently had the Prayer Book in her hand, but oftener the Bible. John Borrow had been offered one hundred pounds by a Committee to paint Robert Hawkes, Mayor of Norwich in 1822, a prominent draper, who became extremely popular for “the nobly liberal spirit in which he sustained the splendour of civic hospitality.” Mr. T. O. Springfield, commonly called “T.O.,” was spokesman of the Committee—a little watchmaker with a hump, Borrow called him. Dr. Knapp denies that he was a watchmaker, but such he was in his early days, though he became very wealthy through speculations in silk, and Mayor of Norwich 1829 and 1836. Quite a character, his tombstone in the Rosary cemetery bears this honourable record: “A merciful magistrate, a successful merchant, A consistent politician, A benevolent benefactor,
He devoted the energies of a vigorous intellect, and the sympathies of a warm heart, to the prosperity of his native city and the welfare of its inhabitants. Beloved, honoured and regretted, He died April 24th, 1855.” John did not feel equal to painting little Mr. Hawkes “striding under the Norman arch out of the cathedral,” but said, “I can introduce you to a great master of the heroic, fully competent to do justice to your mayor.” “T.O.” thought the money should not go to London, but John prevailed, and so came up to London to interview B. R. Haydon, who, owning himself confoundedly hard up, at once accepted the commission. But George comes in as Haydon’s beau ideal for that face of Pharaoh the artist desired to paint; later on Borrow asked Haydon for a sitting, saying he would “sooner lose a thousand pounds than not have the honour of appearing in the picture.” No trace of any such portrait can be found. Haydon’s portrait of Hawkes hangs in St. Andrew’s Hall in close proximity to that of his friend “T.O.,” painted by Philip Westcott.
“I have often thought,” says Borrow, very characteristically, “what a capital picture might have been made by my brother’s friend, if, instead of making the mayor issue out of the Norman arch, he had painted him moving under the sign of the Checquers (sic), or the Three Brewers, with mace—yes, with mace—the mace appears in the picture issuing out of the Norman arch behind the mayor—but likewise with Snap, and with whiffler, quart pot, and frying-pan, Billy Blind, and Owlenglass, Mr. Petulengro, and Pakomovna.”
Borrow’s real literary career had begun with the translation of “Faustus” (1825), a rather lurid German work by F. von Klinger, one of whose plays, Sturm und Drang, gave the name to a whole period of German literature. The book was received very unfavourably, but Borrow meant having his Danish Ballads published, and in 1826 they were issued by S. Wilkin, Upper Haymarket, Norwich, in an edition of five hundred copies, of which two hundred were reserved for Norwich and sold at half a guinea each copy; the rest went to London. Allan Cunningham wrote a very eulogistic metrical dedication. The subscription list reveals a very varied list of subscribers, including Bishop Bathurst, Benjamin Haydon, Thomas Campbell, and
John Thurtell, who was hanged before the book appeared. Borrow’s biographers generally treat these ballads with scarcely veiled contempt, though Lockhart, whose brilliant renderings of Spanish ballads are unsurpassed, wrote of his complete skill in the Scandinavian languages, and his “copious body of translations from their popular minstrelsies, not at all to be confounded with that of certain versifiers. . . . His Norse ditties have the unforgeable stamp of authenticity on every line.” W. Bodham Donne, a well-known critic, even went so far as to rank them above Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome.” A fine facsimile edition of Borrow’s “Romantic Ballads” was brought out by Messrs. Jarrold in the early part of this year.
A rupture with Phillips, almost inevitable, set Borrow wandering, and very soon he became acquainted with the old fruit-woman who found a valid defence for theft in the history of “the blessed Mary Flanders,” a dog’s-eared volume of “Moll Flanders,” wherein Borrow found “the air, the style, the spirit of the writer of the book” which first taught him to read—Defoe, of course. This classic is “supreme as a realistic picture of low life in the large.”
A quite different figure appears in the person of Francis Arden, a handsome young Irishman with whom Borrow became acquainted in the coffee-room of an hotel, and with him obtained some knowledge of “the strange and eccentric places of London.” When Arden burst out laughing one day Borrow said he would, perhaps, have joined if it were ever his wont to laugh, and his friends said that, though he enjoyed a joke, he did not seem to have the power of laughing. But in Borrow we expect contrarieties, so we find him saying that when he detected a man poking fun at him in Welsh he flung back his head, closed his eyes, and laughed aloud; and later on, walking in Wales with the rain at his back, he flung his umbrella over his shoulder and laughed. “Oh, how a man laughs who has a good umbrella when he has the rain at his back” (“Wild Wales,” pp. 301, 470).
Passing by Borrow’s meetings with the Armenian merchant, we come to the time when, as he says, he found himself reduced to his last half-crown, and set about writing the “Life and Adventures