principle of heredity was even more strikingly developed—­the Taylors of Ongar.  In February 1824 his father, the gallant Captain Thomas Borrow, died, and his articles in the firm of a Norwich solicitor having determined, George went to London to commence literary man, in the old sense of the servitude, under the well-known bookseller-publisher, Sir Richard Phillipps.  In Grub Street he translated and compiled galore, but when the trees began to shoot in 1825 he broke his chain and escaped to the country, to the dingle, and to Isopel Berners.

To dwell upon the bare outlines of Borrow’s early career would be a superfluously dull proceeding.  We shall only add a few names and dates to the framework, supplied with a fidelity that is rare in much more formal works of autobiography, in the pages of Lavengro.  From the same pages we may detach just a few of the earlier influences which went to make up the rare and complex individuality of the writer.  Borrow’s father, a fine old soldier, in revealing his son’s youthful idiosyncrasy, projects a clear mental image of his own habit of mind.  “The boy had the impertinence to say the classics were much over-valued, and amongst other things that some horrid fellow or other, some Welshman, I think (thank God it was not an Irishman), was a better poet than Ovid. {2} That a boy of his years should entertain an opinion of his own, I mean one which militates against all established authority, is astonishing.  As well might a raw recruit pretend to offer an unfavourable opinion on the manual and platoon exercise.  The idea is preposterous; the lad is too independent by half.”

Borrow’s account of his father’s death is a highly affecting piece of English.  The ironical humour blent with pathos in his picture of this ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart with a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of “My Uncle Toby"), the details of the ailments and the portents that attended his infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the wandering military life from barrack to barrack and from garrison to garrison, inevitably remind the reader of the childish reminiscences of Laurence Sterne, a writer to whom it may thus early be said that George Borrow paid no small amount of unconscious homage.  A homage of another sort, fully recognised and declared, was that paid to the great work of Defoe, and to the spirit of strange and romantic enterprise which it aroused in its reader.

After Robinson Crusoe there played across the disk of his youthful memory a number of weird and hairy figures never to be effaced.  A strange old herbalist and snake-killer with a skin cap first whetted his appetite for the captivating confidences of roadside vagrants, and the acquaintanceship serves as an introduction to the scene of the gipsy encampment, where the young Sapengro or serpent charmer was first claimed as brother by Jasper Petulengro.  The picture of the encampment may serve as an example of Borrovian prose, nervous, unembarrassed, and graphic.