“Poor George. . . . I wish he were making money.  He works hard and remains¹ poor”—thus wrote John Borrow to his mother in 1830 from Mexico, and it disposes in a measure of any suggestion of mystery with regard to five of those years that he wished to veil.  They were not spent, it is clear, in rambling² in the East, as he tried to persuade Colonel Napier many years later.  They were spent for the most part in diligent³ attempt at the capture of words, in reading the poetry and the prose of many lands, and in making translations of unequal merit from these diverse tongues.  This is indisputably brought home to me by the manuscripts in my possession.  These manuscripts represent years of work.  Borrow has been counted a considerable linguist⁴, and he had assuredly a reading and speaking acquaintance with a great many languages.  But this knowledge was acquired, as all knowledge is, with infinite trouble and patience.  I have before me hundreds of small sheets of paper upon which are written English words and their equivalents in some twenty or thirty languages.  These serve to show that Borrow learnt a language as a small boy in an old-fashioned system of education learns his Latin or French—by writing down simple words—“father,” “mother,” “horse,” “dog,” and so on with the same word in Latin or French in front of them.  Of course Borrow had a superb memory and abundant enthusiasm, and so was enabled to add one language to another and to make his translations from such books as he could obtain with varied⁵ success.  I believe that nearly all the books that he handled came from the Norwich library, and when Mrs. Borrow wrote to her elder son to say that George was working hard, as we may fairly assume, from the reply quoted, that she did, she was recalling this laborious⁶ work at translation that must have gone on for years.  We have seen p. 82the first fruit in the translation from the German—or possibly from the French—of Klinger’s Faustus; we have seen it in Romantic

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