glad of a date,—­Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich, and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,—­a harmless pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention of young Mr. Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place.  Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace.  ‘By adopting the law,’ says Borrow, ’I had not ceased to be Lavengro.’  He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone.  He studied German under the direction of the once famous William Taylor of Norwich, who in 1821 wrote to Southey:  ’A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller’s William Tell, with a view of translating it for the press.  His name is George Henry Borrow, and he has learnt German with extraordinary rapidity.  Indeed, he has the gift of tongues, and though not yet eighteen, understands twelve languages—­English, Welsh, Erse, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.  He would like to get into the office for Foreign Affairs, but does not know how.’

It only takes five years to make an attorney, and Borrow ought therefore, had he served out his time, to have become a gentleman by Act of Parliament in 1824 or 1825.  He did not do so, though he appears to have remained in Norwich until after 1826.  In that year appeared his Romantic Ballads from the Danish, printed by Simon Wilkins of Norwich by subscription.  Dr. Jessopp opines that the Romantic Ballads must have brought their translator ’a very respectable sum after paying all the expenses of publication.’  I hope it was so, but, as Dr. Johnson once said about the immortality of the soul, I should like more evidence of it.  When Borrow left Norwich for London, it is hard to say.  It was after the death of his father, and was not likely to have been later than 1828.  His only introduction appears to have been one from William Taylor to Sir Richard Phillips, ‘the publisher’ known to all readers of Lavengro.  Sir Richard was one of the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, and in addition to sundry treatises on the duties of juries, was the author of two lucubrations, respectively entitled The Phaenomena called by the name of Gravitation proved to be Proximate Effects of the Orbicular and Rotary Motions of the Earth and On the New Theory of the System of the Universe.  In Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica, 1824, Sir Richard is thus contemptuously referred to:  ’This personage is the editor of The Monthly Magazine, in which many of his effusions may be found with the signature of “Common Sense."’ It is not too much to say that but for Borrow this