Borrow was fortunate, apparently, in the occasions of some of these Johnsonian fulminations. It is not everybody who would endure the treatment so mildly as did the ex-army officer, or that latitudinarian don who is reported once to have met Borrow at Dr. Hake’s house. The pundit preached at Borrow for some time, so runs the tale, and, when he had finished, Borrow thumped the table with his fist, crying, “Sir, you’re a fool!” As Punch very justly remarked about this prodigious narrative, because the article in which it appeared was in praise of Borrow, Borrow’s rudeness was made to appear to be “the end of the don for ever . . . there was no appeal.” Yet the don probably had a case, and if the article had been in praise of him, Borrow would certainly have been made to appear the fool. He has suffered not a little from the ill-regulated enthusiasm of admirers who insist on counting his petulance and his outbursts of boorishness as his minor virtues instead of his major vices.
A quaint commentary on anecdotes of this sort is Berkeley’s assertion that Borrow often repeated to him the answer he received from an old prize-fighter in reply to the question, “What is the best way to get through life quietly?”—“Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head.” Surely the most illuminating example of pure precept without example that can be unearthed in all literature. Berkeley shared the common fate of Borrow’s associates who supposed that a successful writer would care to discuss other writers. The genial vicar found how good a hater his visitor was; he displayed his spleen against the Martineaus; he foamed over the inoffensive Mrs. Stowe. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was then the fashion, and Berkeley sang its praises. Borrow showed great excitement, and presently exploded invective against “a lot of Uncle Toms and Tomfools!” When he cooled down he had the grace to apologise for his vehemence.
But in all this intercourse with the lively Orangeman, of course, Borrow is to be seen only on one side, and that not the best, of his many-sided character. It was his controversial side. Berkeley, not native, had little intimate knowledge of Cornwall. Just one fact appears in his reminiscences which may fitly bridge the gulf between these episodes and Borrow’s real adventures. He liked to pore over the register of St. Cleer Church, where the names of so many Borrows were inscribed, and one day was sent into transports of delight by the discovery of a marriage record in which the woman’s name was Jenefer—a name commoner in Cornwall aforetime than at present. “Can you not see?” he cried. “It is Guinevere, King Arthur’s wife!”
Borrow, who wrote that fine passage about Stonehenge, which has been already quoted (p. [54]), who waited for sunrise over that silent plain under the portal of giants, could not fail to be fascinated by the archæological riches of his father’s native place. Particularly was he entranced by the Trevethy Stone—alternatively “Trethevy.” Few parishes in the kingdom can boast a prehistoric structure of so elaborate a kind as this huge cromlech, few parish roads so great a store of relics of bygone art and ancient piety as the mile or so of parish road that Borrow traversed in order to reach it. It is at once the finest and the least-known cromlech in the West of England, and in a splendid state of preservation. The walls are four huge slabs of granite, only one of which has departed from the perpendicular; the roof is a fifth huge slab, in one corner of which is a round hole that has formed the theme of many a heated archæological discussion. If, as is supposed, the ancients (who without the assistance of machinery dealt with such enormous weights as these) first constructed great earthworks, and then pulled the rocks into position by rolling them up the slopes upon the trunks of fir-trees, the hole may have been used for the attachment of the ropes upon which the army of workmen hauled. Or the hole may be the work of weather, which has wrought such pixy-pranks in granite, as may be observed in the Devil’s Cheesewring not far off. The Trethevy cromlech must have been the memorial, and probably the burial-place, of some great chieftain. Whatever the grave or the cairn contained, it was, like all the other monuments of the kind, rifled ages ago, and nothing but the silent stones is left.
Borrow says of his sensations when he saw it, “A thrill came over me as I surveyed this gigantic erection.” He does not tell us what his speculations were as to the origin of the hole; but after he had climbed to the top and carefully measured every stone, he put his arm through the hole, and shouted, “Success to Old Cornwall!” He spares us the obvious comparison between the Eleusinian Mysteries and the rites of the Mên-an-tol, or holed stone, administered to Druidic neophytes.
From Penquite it was not a far cry, for a man who walked five miles in an hour with ease, to the great brown-backed hill of Caradon, seamed all along its foot with the wounds inflicted by centuries of miners. Caradon is twelve hundred feet high, and gives a wonderful prospect over two counties. From its summit, on a clear day, the Atlantic to the North and the Channel to the South are the limits of vision. Across the narrow gorge intervening strode the hat-less pedestrian of six-feet-three, looking like some nineteenth-century giant Caradon swallowing up the miles of bracken and heath, to the round hill where the Devil’s Cheesewring was piled, examining with curiosity, just below the peak, the hut of one Daniel Gumb. Gumb was no gnome, no pixy, no mythical person, as his name might almost betoken, but a veritable person in the flesh, stonemason and mathematician, who had carved in the block of granite that formed the roof of his dwelling-place a problem of Euclid. There are the squares and triangles remaining to this day to attest both his scholarship and his craft. On a heath near by, Borrow was shown three stone circles which carried his mind back three thousand years at least (Sir Norman Lockyer may be able to say how much more), “the Hurlers”—according to quaint tradition the petrified bodies of groups of profane persons who played the ancient Cornish game of hurling on a Sunday. There is one stone pillar a little distance to the south of the circles, which is said to have been the messenger who was going to St. Cleer for ale when the sudden petrifaction took place. This looks, however, like an excrescence of modern humour, probably conceived by a foreigner, since natives would joke with reluctance on such a subject. Sunday is a golfless day in Cornwall even now. Another and a less ribald version of the story was given to Borrow at Woolston. It related that while the hurlers were gathered where the three circles now are, on Cradock Moor there was a giant, who held in his hand a golden ball, which he was to throw over the tower of St. Cleer Church, and the first of the hurlers to find it was to possess it. The giant shared the fate of the other Sabbath-breakers, and is to be seen to this day on the moor in the form of “The Longstone”—an old round-headed cross.
A few miles in upon the moor to the north, Borrow twice visited the very heart and centre of Cornish romance—the lonely mountain pool of Dozmary. Set high among the wild, uncultivated hills, the pool breathes mystery. It is hundreds of feet above the river that winds down the combes: whence comes the water? The love of magical solutions for natural conundrums is deep-rooted. Colloquial opinion has held the pool in awe, reported it fathomless; and at the present day, to explain a lake at the top of a hill, with no visible intake of water, by saying it is fed from the inexhaustible reservoir of the peat in the surrounding country, is not held by some people to be facing the question adequately. But the spiritual and legendary mysteries of Dozmary were far more attractive to Borrow. It is reputed to be the original setting of two of the great legends of the world—the Passing of Arthur, and the Penance of Tregeagle.
Standing on the silver strand that belts the lake, on a moonlit night of such winter weather as Borrow found in the hills, it is easy to reconstruct the ritual of the Mort d’Arthur, either on the lines of Malory or those of Tennyson, to erect stately scenes and silent processionals, to enact the temptation of Bedivere, to select the clump of flags in which he hid the brand Excalibur, to see his three journeys to the shore, and finally to watch the whirling and flashing of the blade as it left his hand and curved over the water, where rose that arm
“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.”
It is easy to imagine the last scene of all—Arthur coming