Lavengro, George Borrow [i love reading books txt] 📗

And when my hat came down, I put it on my head and commenced running, directing my course to the house of the Antinomian preacher, who sold books, and whom I knew to have Bibles in various tongues amongst the number, and I arrived out of breath, and I found the Antinomian in his little library, dusting his books; and the Antinomian clergyman was a tall man of about seventy, who wore a hat with a broad brim and a shallow crown, and whose manner of speaking was exceedingly nasal; and when I saw him, I cried, out of breath, “Have you a Danish Bible?” and he replied, “What do you want it for, friend?” and I answered, “to learn Danish by;” “and may be to learn thy duty,” replied the Antinomian preacher. “Truly, I have it not; but, as you are a customer of mine, I will endeavour to procure you one, and I will write to that laudable society which men call the Bible Society, an unworthy member of which I am, and I hope by next week to procure what you desire.”

And when I heard these words of the old man, I was very glad, and my heart yearned towards him, and I would fain enter into conversation with him; and I said, “Why are you an Antinomian? For my part, I would rather be a dog than belong to such a religion.” “Nay, friend,” said the Antinomian, “thou forejudgest us; know that those who call us Antinomians call us so despitefully, we do not acknowledge the designation.” “Then you do not set all law at nought?” said I. “Far be it from us,” said the old man, “we only hope that, being sanctified by the Spirit from above, we have no need of the law to keep us in order. Did you ever hear tell of Lodowick Muggleton?” “Not I.” “That is strange; know then that he was the founder of our poor society, and after him we are frequently, though opprobriously, termed Muggletonians,103 for we are Christians. Here is his book, which, perhaps, you can do no better than purchase, you are fond of rare books, and this is both curious and rare; I will sell it cheap. Thank you, and now be gone, I will do all I can to procure the Bible.”

And in this manner I procured the Danish Bible, and I commenced my task; first of all, however, I locked up in a closet the volume which had excited my curiosity, saying, “Out of this closet thou comest not till I deem myself competent to read thee,” and then I sat down in right earnest, comparing every line in the one version with the corresponding one in the other; and I passed entire nights in this manner, till I was almost blind, and the task was tedious enough at first, but I quailed not, and soon began to make progress. And at first I had a misgiving that the old book might not prove a Danish book, but was soon reassured by reading many words in the Bible which I remembered to have seen in the book; and then I went on right merrily, and I found that the language which I was studying was by no means a difficult one, and in less than a month I deemed myself able to read the book.

Anon, I took the book from the closet, and proceeded to make myself master of its contents; I had some difficulty, for the language of the book, though in the main the same as the language of the Bible, differed from it in some points, being apparently a more ancient dialect; by degrees, however, I overcame this difficulty, and I understood the contents of the book, and well did they correspond with all those ideas in which I had indulged connected with the Danes. For the book was a book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and champions, and men of huge stature; ballads which from time immemorial had been sung in the North, and which some two centuries before the time of which I am speaking had been collected by one Anders Vedel,104 who lived with a certain Tycho Brahe, and assisted him in making observations upon the heavenly bodies, at a place called Uranias Castle, on the little island of Hveen, in the Cattegat.

It might be some six months after the events last recorded, that two individuals105 were seated together in a certain room, in a certain street of the old town which I have so frequently had occasion to mention in the preceding pages; one of them was an elderly, and the other a very young man, and they sat on either side of the fireplace, beside a table, on which were fruit and wine; the room was a small one, and in its furniture exhibited nothing remarkable. Over the mantelpiece, however, hung a small picture with naked figures in the foreground, and with much foliage behind. It might not have struck every beholder, for it looked old and smoke-dried; but a connoisseur, on inspecting it closely, would have pronounced it to be a Judgment of Paris, and a masterpiece of the Flemish School.

The forehead of the elder individual was high, and perhaps appeared more so than it really was, from the hair being carefully brushed back, as if for the purpose of displaying to the best advantage that part of the cranium; his eyes were large and full, and of a light brown, and might have been called heavy and dull, had they not been occasionally lighted up by a sudden gleam⁠—not so brilliant, however, as that which at every inhalation shone from the bowl of the long clay pipe he was smoking, but which, from a certain sucking sound which about this time began to be heard from the bottom, appeared to be