years of continuous wandering. The West Norfolk Militia were watching the French prisoners at Norman Cross for fifteen months. After that we have glimpses of them at Colchester, at East Dereham again, at Harwich, at Leicester, at Huddersfield, concerning which place Borrow incidentally in
Wild Wales writes of having been at school, in Sheffield, in Berwick-on-Tweed, and finally the family are in Edinburgh, where they arrive on 6th April, 1813. We have already referred to Borrow’s presence at the High School of Edinburgh, the school sanctified by association with Walter Scott and so many of his illustrious fellow-countrymen. He and his brother were at the High School for a single session, that is, for the winter session of 1813–14, although with the licence of a maker of fiction he claimed, in
Lavengro, to have been there for two years. But it is not in this brief period of schooling of a boy of ten that we find the strongest influence that Edinburgh gave to Borrow. Rather may we seek it in the acquaintanceship with the once too notorious David Haggart. Seven years later than this all the peoples of the three kingdoms were discussing David Haggart, the Scots Jack Sheppard, the clever young prison-breaker, who was hanged at Edinburgh in 1821 for killing his gaoler in Dumfries prison. How much David Haggart filled the imagination of every one who could read in the early years of last century is demonstrated by a reference to the Library Catalogue of the British Museum, where we find pamphlet after pamphlet, broadsheet after broadsheet, treating of the adventures, trial, and execution of this youthful gaolbird. But by far the most valuable publication with regard to Haggart is one that Borrow must have read in his youth. This was a life of Haggart written by himself, a little book that had a wide circulation. From this little biography we learn that Haggart was born in Golden Acre, near Canon-Mills, in the county of Edinburgh in 1801, his father, John Haggart, being a gamekeeper, and in later years a dog-trainer. The boy was at school under Mr. Robin Gibson at Canon-Mills for two years. He left school at ten years of age, and from that time until his execution seems to have had a continuous career of thieving. He tells us that before he was eleven years old he had stolen a bantam cock from a woman belonging to the New Town of Edinburgh. He went with another boy to Currie, six miles from Edinburgh, and there stole a pony, but this was afterwards returned. When but twelve years of age he attended Leith races, and it was here that he enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, then stationed in Edinburgh Castle. This may very well have brought him into contact with Borrow in the way described in
Lavengro. He was only, however, in the regiment for a year, for when it was sent back to England the Colonel in command of it obtained young Haggart’s discharge. These dates coincide with Borrow’s presence in Edinburgh. Haggart’s history for the next five or six years was in truth merely that of a wandering pickpocket, sometimes in Scotland, sometimes in England, and finally he became a notorious burglar. Incidentally he refers to a girl with whom he was in love. Her name was Mary Hill. She belonged to Ecclefechan, which Haggart more than once visited. He must therefore have known Carlyle, who had not then left his native village. In 1820 we find him in Edinburgh, carrying on the same sort of depredations both there and at Leith—now he steals a silk plaid, now a greatcoat, and now a silver teapot. These thefts, of course, landed him in gaol, out of which he breaks rather dramatically, fleeing with a companion to Kelso. He had, indeed, more than one experience of gaol. Finally, we find him in the prison of Dumfries destined to stand his trial for “one act of house-breaking, eleven cases of theft, and one of prison-breaking.” While in prison at Dumfries he planned another escape, and in the attempt to hit a gaoler named Morrin on the head with a stone he unexpectedly killed him. His escape from Dumfries gaol after this murder, and his later wanderings, are the most dramatic part of his book. He fled through Carlisle to Newcastle, and then thought that he would be safer if he returned to Scotland, where he found the rewards that were offered for his arrest faced him wherever he went. He turned up again in Edinburgh, where he seems to have gone about freely, although reading everywhere the notices that a reward of seventy guineas was offered for his apprehension. Then he fled to Ireland, where he thought that his safety was assured. At Dromore he was arrested and brought before the magistrate, but he spoke with an Irish brogue, and declared that his name was John M‘Colgan, and that he came from Armagh. He escaped from Dromore gaol by jumping through a window, and actually went so far as to pay three pound ten shillings for his passage to America, but he was afraid of the sea, and changed his mind, and lost his passage money at the last moment. After this he made a tour right through Ireland, in spite of the fact that the Dublin
Hue and Cry had a description of his person which he read more than once. His assurance was such that in Tullamore he made a pig-driver apologise before the magistrate for charging him with theft, although he had been living on nothing else all the time he was in Ireland. Finally, he was captured, being recognised by a policeman from Edinburgh. He was brought from Ireland to Dumfries, landed in Calton gaol, Edinburgh, and was tried and executed.
We may pass over the brief sojourn in Norwich that was Borrow’s lot in 1814, when the West Norfolk Militia left Scotland. When Napoleon escaped from Elba the West Norfolk Regiment was despatched to Ireland, and Captain Borrow again took his family with him. We find the boy with his family at Clonmel from May to December of 1815. Here Borrow’s elder brother, now a boy of fifteen, was promoted from Ensign to Lieutenant. In January, 1816, the Borrows moved to Templemore, returning to England in May of that year. Borrow, we see, was less than a year in Ireland, and he was only thirteen years of age when he left the country. But it seems to have been the greatest influence that guided his career. Three of the most fascinating chapters in Lavengro were one outcome of that brief sojourn, a thirst for the acquirement of languages was another, and perhaps a taste for romancing a third. Borrow never came to have the least sympathy with the Irish race, or its national aspirations. As the son of a half-educated soldier he did not come in contact with any but the vagabond element of Ireland, exactly as his father had done before him. Captain Borrow was asked on one occasion what language is being spoken:
“Irish,” said my father with a loud voice, “and a bad language it is. . . . There’s one part of London where all the Irish live—at least the worst of them—and there they hatch their villainies to speak this tongue.”
And Borrow followed his father’s prejudices throughout his life, although in the one happy year in which he wrote The Bible in Spain he was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his work:
Honour to Ireland and her “hundred thousand welcomes”! Her fields have long been the greenest in the world; her daughters the fairest; her sons the bravest and most eloquent. May they never cease to be so. [33a]
In later years Orangemen were to him the only attractive element in the life of Ireland, and we may be sure that he was not displeased when his stepdaughter married one of them. Yet the creator of literature works more wisely than he knows, and Borrow’s books have won the wise and benign appreciation of many an Irish and Roman Catholic reader, whose nationality and religion Borrow would have anathematised. Irishmen may forgive Borrow much, because he was one of the first of modern English writers to take their language seriously. [33b] It is true that he had but the most superficial knowledge of it. He admits—in Wild Wales—that he only knew it “by ear.” The abundant Irish literature that has been so diligently studied during the last quarter of a century was a closed book to Borrow, whose few translations from the Irish have but little value. Yet the very appreciation of Irish as a language to be seriously studied in days before Dr. George Sigerson and Dr. Douglas Hyde had waxed enthusiastic and practical kindles our gratitude. Then what a character is Murtagh. We are sure there was a Murtagh, although, unlike Borrow’s other boyish and vagabond friend Haggart, we know nothing about him but what Borrow has to tell. Yet what a picture is this where Murtagh wants a pack of cards:
“I say, Murtagh!”
“Yes, Shorsha dear!”
“I have a pack of cards.”
“You don’t say so, Shorsha ma vourneen?—you don’t say that you have cards fifty-two?”
“I do, though; and they are quite new—never been once used.”
“And you’ll be lending them to me, I warrant?”
“Don’t think it!—But I’ll sell them to you, joy, if you like.”
“Hanam mon Dioul! am I not after telling you that I have no money at all?”
