Footnotes

“I have long wished that the Irish literature were cultivated. Ireland is known by tradition to have been once the seat of piety and learning, and surely it would be very acceptable to all those who are curious on the origin of nations or the affinities of languages to be further informed of the evolution of a people so ancient and once so illustrious. I hope that you will continue to cultivate this kind of learning which has too long been neglected, and which, if it be suffered to remain in oblivion for another century, may perhaps never be retrieved.”

“Old memories brought him to our office for professional advice, and there I saw something of him, and a very striking personality he was, and a rather difficult client to do business with. One peculiarity I remember was that he believed himself to be plagued by autograph hunters, and was reluctant to trust our firm with his signature in any shape or form, and that we in consequence had some trouble in inducing him to sign his will. I have seen him sitting over my fire in my room at that office for hours, half asleep, and crooning out Romany songs while waiting for my chief.”

(Carlyle’s translation.)

Year. Bibles. Testaments. Portions. Total.

1910 5,309 8,971 70,594 84,874

1911 5,665 11,481 79,525 96,671

1912 9,083 11,842 85,024 105,949

The Calle del Principe is now rapidly being pulled down and new buildings taking the place of those Borrow knew.

“I think Borrow intended ‘Carreta’ for ‘dearest.’ It is impossible to think that he would call his wife a ‘cart.’ Perhaps he intended ‘Carreta’ for ‘Querida.’ Probably their pronunciation was not Castillian, and they spelled the word as they pronounced it. In speaking of her to ‘Hen.’ Borrow always called her ‘Mamma.’ Mrs. MacOubrey took a great fancy to me because she said I was like ‘Mamma.’ She meant in character, not in person.”

r 74.

Ah Moon of my Delight, who knowest no wane, The Moon of Heaven is rising once again, How oft, hereafter rising, shall she look Through this same Garden after me—in vain.

“What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort. Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of ‘civilised’ life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can say, though he would not have you say it—Requiescat in pace Viator.”