Owing to the somewhat eccentric manner in which he passed his latter days, there were some persons who assumed after his death that in his declining years he lacked the attention of friends, and the little comforts and considerations that are due to old age. Yet this was not so; if the world heard little of him from the time of his final retirement into rural seclusion, and lost sight of him and believed him dead, it was his own choosing that they should remain in ignorance. He had had his day, a longer and fuller one than falls to the lot of most of the sons of men, and, when the weight of years began to tell upon him, he chose to live out the little time that was left to him amidst such scenes as were in harmony with his nature. He died at Oulton on July 26, 1881, just three weeks after the completion of his seventy-eighth year. His step-daughter, Mrs. MacOubrey, the Henrietta of “Wild Wales,” who had a sincere affection for him, was his constant attendant during his last illness, and was with him at the end. He was buried at Brompton Cemetery, where his body lies beside that of his wife. Not long after his death, his Oulton home was pulled down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the old summer-house in which he loved to linger, and the ragged fir-trees that sighed the requiem of his last hours.
CHAPTER VI: BORROW AND PUGILISM
During the first quarter of the present century pugilism was rampant in the Eastern Counties of England. A pugilistic encounter was then looked upon as an affair of national interest, and people came in their thousands from far and near to witness it. The Norwich neighbourhood was noted for its prize-fights, and Borrow had the names of all the champions at his tongue’s end. Cobbett, Cribb, Belcher, Tom Spring of Bedford, Black Richmond, Irish Randall—he was acquainted with the records of them all, as well as with those of the leading fighting-men amongst the gipsies. They were to him the leaders of the old spirit of English aggressiveness, and as such he revered them. His pen was always ready to defend a straightforward bruiser, with whom, he contended, the Roman gladiator and the Spanish bull-fighter were not to be compared. He, himself, was no mean student of the art of self-defence, and there is some ground for believing that the scene between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinman, in which the burly tinker succumbs to the
former’s prowess after a warm encounter in the Mumpers’ Dingle, is founded upon an event which occurred during Borrow’s wayward progress through rural England.
On the publication of “Lavengro,” Borrow’s evident partiality for the pugilists of his day brought down upon him a torrent of criticism and condemnation. Who, it was asked, but a man of coarse instincts could have found pleasure in mingling with brutal fighting-men and describing their desperate exploits? The writer of a work who went out of his way to drag in such characters and scenes as these could be little better than a barbarian!
Borrow was not a man to sit down quietly under such attacks as these; he waited his opportunity, and then had his fling. At the end of “The Romany Rye,” there appeared an Appendix, in which the author set himself the task of smashing his critics. This same Appendix is an amazing piece of writing; in it Borrow slashes right and left as might a gallant swordsman who found himself alone in the midst of a mob bent on his destruction. Mr. Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things that Borrovians would be loth to lose.
Borrow’s defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims
defiantly, “Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever one of the English aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by rushing up the stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret, and rescuing a woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer says no. A woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, who ran up the burning stairs.” And so he goes on, overwhelming his opponents with a tornado of generalities that have nothing whatever to do with prize-fighting, and yet how delightful it all is!
There were other critics—Borrow always had plenty of critics—who found it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his denunciation in one passage of “those disgraceful and brutalising exhibitions called pugilistic combats.” The explanation has been suggested that for once the “John Bull” Borrow, with his patriotic exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It would be hard to find a writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a man of “moods” that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do not tally with a superhuman exactitude.
But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he drank on his Welsh rambles—and has not “Wild Wales” been called “The Epic of Ale?”—or his associations with the great fighting-men of his day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the men. “Why should I hide the truth?” he asks, when telling of his presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near Norwich. Thurtell, whose boast it was that he had introduced bruising into East Anglia, had arranged the fight, which was ever after memorable to Borrow for the appearance on the scene of Gipsy Will and his celebrated gang. This well-known Romany, who was afterwards hanged outside the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds for a murder committed in his youth, was a sturdy, muscular fellow, six feet in height, who rendered himself especially noticeable by wearing a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian hat. He was anxious on this occasion to fight the best man in England for twenty pounds (not a very tempting sum in the light of our more advanced days); but no one accepted the challenge, though a young countryman was anxious to do so until assured by his friends that the notorious gipsy would certainly kill him.