George, on account of the strangeness of his interests and his thirst
for a knowledge of men and the tongues in which they communicate to
each other their ideas. It would be impossible for an unconventional
linguist, such as George Borrow was by instinct, to remain
uneducated, and it was equally impossible to educate him.

Quite unaware of the trend of his younger son's genius, Captain
Borrow obtained for him a free-scholarship at the Grammar School,
then under the headmastership of the Rev. Edward Valpy, B.D., whose
principal claims to fame are his severity, his having flogged the
conqueror of the "Flaming Tinman," and his destruction of the School
Records of Admission, which dated back to the Sixteenth Century.
Among Borrow's contemporaries at the Grammar School were "Rajah"
Brooke of Sarawak (for whose achievements he in after life expressed
a profound admiration), Sir Archdale Wilson of Delhi, Colonel Charles
Stoddart, Dr James Martineau, and Thomas Borrow Burcham, the London
Magistrate.

Borrow was now thirteen, and, it would appear, as determined as ever
to evade as much as possible academic learning. He was "far from an
industrious boy, fond of idling, and discovered no symptoms by his
progress either in Latin or Greek of that philology, so prominent a
feature of his last work (Lavengro)." {20a} Borrow was an idler
merely because his work was uncongenial to him. "Mere idleness is
the most disagreeable state of existence, and both mind and body are
continually making efforts to escape from it," he wrote in later
years concerning this period. He wanted an object in life, an
occupation that would prove not wholly uncongenial. That he should
dislike the routine of school life was not unnatural; for he had
lived quite free from those conventional restraints to which other