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Suddenly the song of a nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and romance. “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.” Borrow is proud of being an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the Open-Air Club. “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.” Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales.

A scholar and a philologist himself, he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Borrowfollowing in Lavengro’s footsteps from one country to another with unflagging enthusiasm. Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worship runs to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow’s writings are condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr.

I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying themamid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr.

And yet few things have done more to prejudice the public against Borrow than the Doctor’s tale of Lavengro’s outrage at Rougham Rookery, the residence of the banker Bevan, one of the kindest and most benevolent men in Suffolk. This story, often told by Hake, appeared at last in print in his memoirs. Invited to dinner by Mr.

In swimming Borrow clawed the water like a dog. I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the swimmer, whom I perceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who lived thereabouts, and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped the action of my heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to rise again, however, in glow of pleasure and excitement: so august a presence was Lavengro’s then!