by the English "pocket Goethe," William Taylor, the head of a clan known
as the Taylors of Norwich, to distinguish them from a race in which the
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