George Henry Borrow, to give him for once his full baptismal name, was born at East Dereham, “a beautiful little town in the western division of Norfolk,” on July 5, 1803. His father, who came of an old Cornish family, was in his forty-fifth year when Borrow was born, having married ten years previously Anne Perfrement, of a family which had migrated from Dauphiné in the days of Dutch William. The father was captain in a marching regiment, the West Norfolk Militia. Like Sterne’s therefore, Borrow’s early life was nomadic, and his school-life was broken between Edinburgh, Clonmel, and Norwich. But his real mentors were found in this last city, where he came in contact with a French _emigré_ named d’Éterville. Here, too, he fell under the influence of “godless Billy” Taylor, and dreamt of writing plays and poems and abusing religion. Here, too, while he ought to have been studying law, he was claiming acquaintance with gipsies, bruisers, and shady characters, such as the notorious Thurtell. A more dangerous influence to Borrow than any, perhaps, was that of Sir John Bowring, a plausible polyglot, who deliberately used his facility in acquiring and translating tongues as a ladder to an administrative post abroad. Borrow, as was perhaps natural, put a wrong construction upon his sympathy, and his apparently disinterested ambition to leave no poetic fragment in Russian, Swedish, Polish, Servian, Bohemian, or Hungarian unrendered into English. He determined to emulate a purpose so lofty in its detachment, and the mistake cost him dear, for it led him for long years into a veritable _cul de sac_ of literature; it led also to the accentuation of that pseudo-philological mania which played such havoc with the ordinary development of rational ideas in a man in many respects so sane as Borrow.