fictions which makes men forget their country.'

I have the permission of the Rev. A. W. Upcher to reprint the following
letter addressed by him some time ago to the Athenaeum .--

One summer day during the Crimean War we had a call from George
Borrow, who had not enjoyed a visit to Anna Gurney so much as he had
expected. In a walking tour round Norfolk he had given her a short
notice of his intended call, and she was ready to receive him. When,
according to his account, he had been but a very short time in her
presence, she wheeled her chair round and reached her hand to one of
her bookshelves and took down an Arabic grammar, and put it into his
hand, asking for explanation of some difficult point, which he tried
to decipher; but meanwhile she talked to him continuously; when, said
he, 'I could not study the Arabic grammar and listen to her at the
same time, so I threw down the book and ran out of the room.' He
seems not to have stopped running till he reached Old Tucker's Inn at
Cromer, where he renewed his strength, or calmed his temper, with five
excellent sausages, and then came on to Sheringham. He told us there
were three personages in the world whom he always had a desire to see;
two of these had slipped through his fingers, so he was determined to
see the third. 'Pray, Mr. Borrow, who were they?' He held up three
fingers of his left hand and pointed them off with the forefinger of
the right: the first, Daniel O'Connell; the second, Lamplighter (the
sire of Phosphorus, Lord Berners's winner of the Derby); the third,
Anna Gurney. The first two were dead and he had not seen them; now he
had come to see Anna Gurney, and this was the end of his visit. I
took him up to the Hall, he talking of many persons and occasionally
doubling his fist, and giving a sort of warning like that of his
Isopel Berners (in _Lavengro_) to give the Flaming Tinman 'Long