We do not need to inquire too deeply as to Borrow’s possible gypsy origin in order to account for his vagabond propensities¹.  The lives of his parents before his birth, and the story of his own boyhood, sufficiently² account for the dominant³ tendency in Borrow.  His father and mother were married in 1793.  Almost every year they changed their domicile.  In 1801 a son was born to them,—they still continued to change their domicile.  Captain Borrow followed his regiment⁴ from place to place, and his family accompanied him on these journeys.  Dover, Colchester, Sandgate, Canterbury, Chelmsford—these are some of the towns where the Borrows sojourned.  It was the merest accident—the Peace of Amiens, to be explicit—that led them back to East Dereham in 1803, so that the second son was born in his grandfather’s house.  George was only a month old when he was carried off to Colchester; in 1804 he was in the barracks of Kent, in 1805 of Sussex, in 1806 at Hastings, in 1807 at Canterbury, and so on.  The whole of the first thirteen years of Borrow’s life is filled up in this way, until in 1816 he and his parents found a home of some permanence in Norwich.  In 1809–10 they were at East Dereham, in 1810–11 at Norman Cross, in 1812 wandering from Harwich to Sheffield, and in 1813 wandering from Sheffield to Edinburgh; in 1814 they were in Norwich, and in 1815–16 in Ireland.  In this last year they returned to Norwich, the father to retire on full pay, and to live in Willow⁶ Lane until his death.  How could a boy, whose first twelve years of life had been made up of such continual wandering, have been other than a restless, nomad-loving man, envious⁷ of the free life of the gypsies, for whom alone in later life he seemed to have kindliness⁸?  Those twelve years are to most boys merely the making of a moral foundation for good or ill; to Borrow they were everything, and at least four

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