them that they will both be starved. There is now a report in the
street that twelve corn-stacks are blazing within twenty miles of
this place. I have lately been wandering about Norfolk, and I am
sorry to say that the minds of the peasantry are in a horrible state
of excitement; I have repeatedly heard men and women in the harvest-
field swear that not a grain of the corn they were cutting should be
eaten, and that they would as lieve be hanged as live. I am afraid
all this will end in a famine and a rustic war.


It was pride that prompted Borrow to ask Dr Bowring to stay his hand
for the moment about a commission. There was no reasonable
possibility of his being able to raise 500 pounds. Even if his
mother had possessed it, which she did not, he would not have drained
her resources of so large an amount. His subsequent attitude towards
the Belgians was characteristic of him. To his acutely sensitive
perceptions, failure to obtain an appointment he sought was a rebuff,
and his whole nature rose up against what, at the moment, appeared to
be an intolerable slight.

Nothing came of the project of collaboration between Bowring and
Borrow beyond an article on Danish and Norwegian literature that
appeared in The Foreign Quarterly Review (June 1830), in which Borrow
supplied translations of the sixteen poems illustrating Bowring's
text. In all probability the response to the prospectus was deemed
inadequate, and Bowring did not wish to face a certain financial
loss.

From Borrow's own letters there is no question that Dr Bowring was
acting towards him in a most friendly manner, and really endeavouring