what unlovely spot in any country had given Borrow birth, it would have become in his eyes sanctified because of the all-important fact that it gave birth to George Borrow, the “word-master.” Rest assured that had he been a fenman he would have been as proud of his treeless, black-earthed fen as he would have been proud of the Swiss mountains had his birthplace chanced to be Switzerland. Rest assured that had he been born upon the barren soil of Damaraland he would have been proud of his desert, as proud as he would have been of any hilly district that had chanced to have the honour of giving him birth. But being born in East Anglia, to feel that he was the typical Anglo-Saxon of all Anglo-Saxons around him, gave him a mighty joy. At “The Bald-faced Stag” his eloquent addresses, to me and the little band of friends who loved him, about Norfolk ale were inspired by the same cause. Compared to that East Anglian nectar all other nectars were “swipes.” I know East Anglia well; few men know it better—few men love it better. I say emphatically that a man more out of sympathy with the East Anglian temperament never lived than he who wished to be taken, and was taken, as the representative East Anglian. Moreover, one very potent reason why he was such a failure in Norfolk—one very potent reason why he was such a failure in his contact with the Anglo-Saxon race generally—was this: he was a Celtic duckling hatched at Dereham, who took himself for a veritable Norfolk chicken. It is no wonder, therefore, that, without knowing it, his sympathy with the Celt, especially the Cymric Celt, which he himself fully believed to be philological, was racial.