Such was Borrow's first greeting in London when, on the morning of April 2nd, 1824, he alighted from the Norwich coach in the yard of the Swan with Two Necks, in a lane now swallowed up by Gresham Street. He proceeded to the lodgings of his friend Roger Kerrison, at 16, Millman Street, Bedford Row; but in May he had developed such alarming, even suicidal, symptoms that Kerrison, fearing he might be involved in a tragedy, hastily moved off to Soho. Borrow was now to begin the real battle of life, and he had to put in practice, as best he might, his motto, "Fear God, and take your own part." He had left behind in Norwich the mother he loved so well, she who ever defended him when his odd speeches and unconventional proceedings called forth criticism or censure. His friend William Taylor had given him introductions in London, and "honest six-foot-three," conscious of possessing unusual powers, mental and physical, set forth to seek literary work. So, with some papers from a little green box, he looked up Sir Richard Phillips, in Tavistock Square, presented him a letter from Mr. So-and-So (W. Taylor), and was promptly assured "literature is a drug." The following Sunday, however, he dined with the old publisher, who was soon to retire to Brighton, and was commissioned to compile six volumes of "Celebrated Trials," etc., "from the earliest records to the year 1825." What a caprice of Fate that the young aspirant should, on the very threshold of his adult career, be thrown into these coulisses of criminal biography! That a taste already keen to search out the birds of prey that haunt the fringe of decorous society, should be immersed, as it were, in a stream of criminal records! Old songs of Denmark, the poems of Ab Gwilym ("worth half a dozen of Chaucer"!), the "romance in the German style," all were ruthlessly swept aside to give place to a catena of lives of notorious evildoers! The Lives and Trials appeared in March, 1825, with a preface by Sir Richard; but without Borrow's name. The intellectual impressions which this task, reaching 3,600 pages, produced on Borrow's mind were, said the publisher, "mournful." The grisly and sordid stories of crime and criminals he had to edit reduced him to a state of gloomy depression. [Picture: Norwich Castle and Cattle Market in Borrow's Time. From a Lithograph. Lent by Norwich Public Library]