At Templemore George Borrow, tall and large-limbed for a lad of thirteen, still had adventures; for on an excursion to visit his brother at Loughmore, he encountered the fierce “Dog of Peace” and its master, Jerry Grant, the outlaw—“a fairy man, in league with fairies and spirits, and able to work much harm by supernatural means, on which account the peasants held him in great awe.” The account of Sergeant Bagge’s encounter with this wizardly creature is in Borrow’s best style. The sergeant thought he had the fellow fast by the throat, but suddenly “the man seemed to melt away from his grasp, and the wind howled more and more, and the night poured
down darker and darker, the snow and the sleet thicker and more blinding. ‘Lord have mercy upon us!’ said Bagge, who concluded that the tussle was ‘not fair but something Irish and supernatural.’” “I daresay,” comments George to his brother, “he’s right. I have read of witchcraft in the Bible.”
At Templemore, too, our boy of thirteen learned to ride, mounted on a tremendous “gallant specimen of the genuine Irish cob,” said by Borrow to be nearly extinct in his day. This horse had been the only friend in the world of his groom, but after a blow would not let him mount. So young Borrow mounted the animal barebacked, for, said the groom, “If you are ever to be a frank rider, you must begin without a saddle; . . . leave it all to him.” Following the groom’s directions, the cob gave his young rider every assistance, and great was the lad’s joy! “Oh, that ride! that first ride!—most truly it was an epoch in my existence; and I still look back to it with feelings of longing and regret. People may talk of first love—it is a very agreeable event, I daresay—but give me the flush and triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride, like mine on the mighty cob! . . . By that one trial I had become free . . . of the whole equine species.” Thus began Borrow’s passion for the equine race, and he avows that with him the pursuit of languages was always modified by his love of horses. As a wonderful pendant to this riding exploit, Borrow tells the tale of the Irish smith who, by a magical word, which thrilled the boy, absolutely maddened the cob, until the wizard soothed it by uttering another word “in a voice singularly modified, but sweet and almost plaintive.”
With this weird episode ends the tale, as “coloured up and poetized” in “Lavengro,” of Borrow’s earliest journeyings and adventures; truly in his case adventures were to the adventurous. Having had all the wild experiences just outlined, small wonder that the strange lad was not very adaptable when, as a free scholar, he came under the rule of the Rev. Edward Valpy at Norwich Grammar School.
Section II.
Norwich (1816-24)—School, Law, And Languages.
The criss-cross experiences of his boyhood, together with his mixed Cornish and Gallic heredity, were elements that very largely helped to create the whimsical character of George Borrow. We have now come to the time when the old soldier, with his pension of eight shillings a day, and his excellent and devoted wife, settled with their two sons at the little house in Willow Lane, Norwich.
For a short time in 1814, when his parents lodged in St. Stephen’s, young George was sent to the Grammar School; but now, in 1816, settled comfortably in Norwich, he was again sent to the Grammar School, under the Rev. Edward Valpy, called by Dr. Knapp “a severe master,” by Mr. Walling “a martinet,” whose “principal claims to fame,” says Mr. Jenkins, “are his severity, his having flogged the conqueror of the ‘Flaming Tinman,’ and his destruction of the School Records of Admission, which dated back to the sixteenth century.” Against this chorus of denunciation, I will quote from a letter the late Dr. Martineau wrote me about Borrow: “It is true that I had to hoist (not ‘horse’) Borrow for his flogging; but not that there was anything exceptional, or capable of leaving permanent scars in the infliction: Mr. Valpy was not given to excess of that kind.” It is a pity that the earliest biographers did not get the opinion of some of Borrow’s surviving schoolfellows as to their old master. Dr. Knapp, in 1899, stated that Dr. Martineau (died January 11th, 1900), and Dr. W. E. Image, D.L., J.P., of Herringswell House, Suffolk (died September 26th, 1903), were the only survivors of Borrow’s schoolmates. Amongst these was Thomas Borrow Burcham, the London Police Magistrate, who, there is good reason
to believe, was a cousin of George’s, as his father married a Mary Perfrement, and T. B. Burcham was christened at East Dereham Church.
