Lavengro, George Borrow [i love reading books txt] 📗
- Author: George Borrow
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Dungarvon times of old: See Life, I, p. 46, and II, pp. 16–17. Cradock’s letter was dated, 18th August, 1849, and Mr. B.’s answer (I, p. 146) a little after. —Knapp ↩
Siol Loughlin, read “Lochlin” (Irish): Literally “the seed of Norway,” i.e., the Danish or Norwegian race. Miss Brooke very properly says (p. 46): “Lochlin is the Gaelic (and Irish) name for Scandinavia in general;” but Borrow limits it to Denmark—the Danish race. And a little below, “the Loughlin songs” are his Danish Ballads which he published the following year. —Knapp ↩
Religious house: The story of Murtagh at the Irish College in Rome, and his subsequent wanderings in the South of France and in Spain, mask, as we have said elsewhere, the peregrinations of George Borrow in 1826–27. —Knapp ↩
Tipperary. ↩
M’anam on Dioul: [God preserve] my soul from the devil! —Knapp ↩
Raparees: Irish marauders, [in the time of] James II. See Life, I, p. 146, and Brooke’s Reliques, p. 205. The latter says that the word is from the Irish Réubóir Ri, plunderer, robber, freebooter of the king, from reubaim, I tear. —Knapp ↩
Chiviter Vik: Cività Vecchia, the modern seaport of Rome, fifty miles distant. —Knapp ↩
Army of the Faith: Spanish frontier corps of observation under Gen. Don Vicente Quesada, 1823–24. —Knapp ↩
Prince Hilt: The Duke d’Angoulême, nephew of Louis XVIII, and son of the Count d’Artois (afterwards Charles X). D’Angoulême invaded Spain in 1823 with 100,000 Frenchmen, to restore Ferdinand VII to his absolute throne, against the Liberals of 1820–23. —Knapp ↩
To ⸻, read Rome. —Knapp ↩
Educated at ⸻, read Rome —Knapp ↩
Direction of the east, read “south.” He could only have gone south from Horncastle to reach Boston (the “large town on the arm of the sea”) that day. The next he came to Spalding, some fifteen miles farther, where he met the recruiting serjeant, thence on to Norwich by Lynn Regis.
We must not forget that before Lavengro was begun, and fifteen years prior to the publication of The Romany Rye, that is, 26th December, 1842, Mr. Petulengro remarked to George Borrow at Oulton: “I suppose you have not forgot how, fifteen [seventeen] years ago, when you made horseshoes in the dingle by the side of the great north road, I lent you fifty guineas to purchase the wonderful trotting cob of the innkeeper with the green Newmarket coat, which three days after you sold for two hundred.”414 Now, this is a very remarkable statement, and, taken in connection with the fact that so little is said about Horncastle in the book, it seems to me we are justified in proclaiming that Borrow was never in Horncastle at all. The interview with the Magyar and the syllabus of Hungarian history are clearly drawn from his experiences in Hungary and Transylvania in the year 1844, and hence are an anachronism here. It is a pity that the author did not adhere to the chronological facts of his life so strictly in The Romany Rye as he did in Lavengro. Truth and literature would have gained by it. And then that valedictory pledge,415 confirmed in the appendix, drawing a veil over the period of his travails, if not his travels, was an error of judgment which, in an autobiography will, we fear, not easily be condoned. —Knapp ↩
Age of nineteen, read “twenty;” he was twenty-one less four months at his father’s death. —Knapp ↩
Children of
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