60 
GEORGE BORROW. 
By Mr. T. WILSON. 15th November, 1904. 
Emerson, classifying books, reserves a last class for the books 
he calls ‘‘ Favourites,” meaning by these the books we can give 
no reason for reading, except that they attract us almost in spite 
of ourselves. Everyone, I suppose, has his own list of these 
‘* Favourites,” and on such a theme probably no two readers would 
think alike. But at the head of my own list stand the works 
of George Borrow, which to my mind are among the most 
charming books in the English language. Though not so well 
known as they deserve to be, they are pre-eminently ‘‘ Favourite ” 
books in Emerson’s sense of the word. I must not weary you at the 
outset with a logical catalogue of their merits. I will simply 
claim that they are entitled to rank among the great books of the 
world, because they succeed in laying bare not only the writer’s 
soul, but the reader’s, and touch the finer issues of human life. 
George Borrow was born, then, as he himself hints in the 
opening chapter of his ‘‘ Lavengro,” on the evening of July 5th, 
in the year 1808, at Hast Dereham, a beautiful little Hast 
Anglian town. His father was a Cornishman who at an early 
age had quitted his kinsfolk to join the King’s army, and had sub- 
sequently been sent to Kast Dereham on recruiting service. Here he 
had courted and wedded Ann Parfrement, a country maiden whose 
ancestors had been Huguenot exiles, and here his two children, 
John and George Henry, were born. Both the sons proved to be 
endowed with natural gifts of no mean order, although their 
characters were strikingly dissimilar. John was of frank, open- 
hearted nature, and made friends with everyone. George, on the 
other hand, appears to have been a dull, and even stupid child, 
of a “ singularity of behaviour,” as he himself says, ‘“‘ which by 
no means tended to dispose people in my favour.” 
George Borrow’s early years are described with much vividness 
in the first chapters of ‘‘ Lavengro.” 
