About this time Borrow had an opportunity of seeing many of "the
bruisers of England." In his veins flowed the blood of the man who
had met Big Ben Bryan and survived the encounter undefeated. "Let no
one sneer at the bruisers of England," Borrow wrote--"What were the
gladiators of Rome, or the bull-fighters of Spain, in its palmiest
days, compared to England's bruisers?" {32b} he asks. On 17th July
1820 Edward Painter of Norwich was to meet Thomas Oliver of London
for a purse of a hundred guineas. On the Saturday previous (the
15th) the Norwich hotels began to fill with bruisers and their
patrons, and men went their ways anxiously polite to the stranger,
lest he turn out to be some champion whom it were dangerous to
affront. Thomas Cribb, the champion of England, had come to see the
fight, "Teucer Belcher, savage Shelton, . . . the terrible Randall, .
. . Bulldog Hudson, . . . fearless Scroggins, . . . Black Richmond, .
. . Tom of Bedford," and a host of lesser lights of the "Fancy."

On the Monday, upwards of 20,000 men swept out of the old city
towards North Walsham, less than twenty miles distant, among them
George Borrow, striding along among the varied stream of men and
vehicles (some 2000 in number) to see the great fight, which was to
end in the victory of the local man and a terrible storm, as if
heaven were thundering its anger against a brutal spectacle. The
sportsmen were left to find their way to shelter, Borrow and Mr
Petulengro, whom he had encountered just after the fight, with them,
talking of dukkeripens (fortunes).

Some time during the year 1820, a Jew named Levy (the Mousha of
Lavengro), Borrow's instructor in Hebrew, introduced him to William
Taylor, {33a} one of the most extraordinary men that Norwich ever
produced. In the long-limbed young lawyer's clerk, whose hair was