The last century was yet in its infancy when the author of _The Romany
Rye_ first saw the light in the sleepy little East Anglian township of
East Dereham, in the county distinguished by Borrow as the one in which
the people eat the best dumplings in the world and speak the purest
English. "Pretty quiet D[ereham]" was the retreat in those days of a
Lady Bountiful in the person of Dame Eleanor Fenn, relict of the worthy
editor of the _Paston Letters_. It is better known in literary history
as the last resting-place of a sad and unquiet spirit, escaped from a
world in which it had known nought but sorrow, of "England's sweetest and
most pious bard," William Cowper. But Destiny was weaving a robuster
thread to connect East Dereham with literature, for George Borrow {1} was
born there on July 5th, 1803, and, nomad though he was, the place was
always dear to his heart as his earliest home.

In 1816, after ramblings far and wide both in Ireland and in Scotland,
the Borrows settled in Norwich, where George was schooled under a master
whose name at least is still familiar to English youth, Dr. Valpy
(brother of Dr. Richard Valpy). Among his schoolfellows at the grammar
school were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George Borrow, a
hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to undergo a
flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never afterwards took
kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We are glad to know
that Edward Valpy's ferule was weak, though his scholarship was strong.
Stories were current that even in those days George used to haunt the
gipsy tents on that Mousehold Heath which lives eternally in the breezy
canvases of "Old Crome," and that he went so far as to stain his face
with walnut-juice to the right Egyptian hue. "Are you suffering from
jaundice, Borrow," asked the Doctor, "or is it merely dirt?" While at
Norwich, too, he was greatly influenced in the direction of linguistics