One day it happened, being on my rambles, I entered a green lane which I had never seen before.  At first it was rather narrow, but as I advanced it became considerably wider.  In the middle was a drift-way with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward of trefoil and clover.  There was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient oaks, which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a canopy and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which was burning fiercely above.  Suddenly a group of objects attracted my attention.  Beneath one of the largest of the trees, upon the grass, was a kind of low tent or booth, from the top of which a thin smoke was curling.  Beside it stood a couple of light carts, whilst two or three lean horses or ponies were cropping the herbage which was growing nigh. . . .

As a pendant to the landscape take a Flemish interior.  The home of the Borrows had been removed in the meantime, in accordance with the roving traditions of the family, from Norman Cross to Edinburgh and from Edinburgh to Clonmel.

And to the school I went [at Clonmel], where I read the Latin tongue and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman who sat behind a black oaken desk with a huge Elzevir Flaccus before him, in a long gloomy kind of hall with a broken stone floor, the roof festooned with cobwebs, the walls considerably dilapidated and covered over with stray figures in hieroglyphics evidently produced by the application of a burnt stick.

In Ireland, too, he made the acquaintance of the gossoon Murtagh, who taught him Irish in return for a pack of cards.  In the course of his wanderings with his father’s regiment he develops into a well-grown and well-favoured lad, a shrewd walker and a bold rider.  “People may talk of first love—­it is a very agreeable event, I dare say—­but give me the flush, the triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride.” {5}

At Norwich he learns modern languages from an old emigre, a true disciple of the ancien cour, who sets Boileau high above Dante; and some misty German metaphysics from the Norwich philosopher, who consistently seeks a solace in smoke from the troubles of life.  His father had already noted his tendency to fly off at a tangent which was strikingly exhibited in the lawyer’s office, where “within the womb of a lofty deal desk,” when he should have been imbibing Blackstone and transcribing legal documents, he was studying Monsieur Vidocq and translating the Welsh bard Ab Gwilym; he was consigning his legal career to an early grave when he wrote this elegy on the worthy attorney his master.