‘Catherine Gurney,’ writes Caroline Fox, ‘gave us a note to George Borrow, so on him we called—a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.’ We gather from the same lady that it was Joseph John Gurney who recommended George Borrow to the Committee of the Bible Society. ‘So he stalked up to London, and they gave him a hymn to translate into the Manchow language, and the same to one of their people to translate also. When compared they proved to be very different. When put before their reader, he had the candour to say that Borrow’s was much the better of the two. On this they sent him to Petersburg to get it printed, and then gave him business in Portugal.’ One thing is clear—that Borrow was a lonely man, and evidently one who did not hold the resources of civilization in such esteem as Mr. Gladstone does. He loved Nature and her ways, and people like the gipsies, who are supposed to be of a similar way of thinking. He eschewed the hum of cities and the roar of the ‘madding crowd.’ He was big in body and in mind, and wanted elbow-room; and yet what would he have been if he had not lived in a city, and come under the stimulative influence of such men as Edward Taylor, of Norwich? It is idle to complain of cities, however they sully the air, and deface the land, and pollute the water, and rear the weak and vicious and the wicked—to remind us how low and depraved human nature can become when it is cut off from communion with Nature and Nature’s God. Borrow owed much to cities, and was best appreciated by the men who dwelt in them. There is often a good deal of affectation about the love of rural solitude, nor does it often last long when there is a wife to have a voice in the matter. Yet in Borrow undoubtedly the feeling was sincere, and of him Wordsworth might have written— ‘As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die.’