Here he seems to have been for two or three years.

Dr.Jessopp has told us the story of Borrow's dyeing his face with walnut juice, and Valpy gravely inquiring of him, 'Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt ?' The Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Archdale Wilson, and the Rev.James Martineau were at school with 'Lavengro.' Dr.Jessopp, who in 1859 became headmaster of King Edward's School, and who has been a Borrovian from the beginning, found the school tradition to be that Borrow, who never reached the sixth form, was indolent and even stupid.

In 1819,--the reader will be glad of a date,--Borrow left school, and was articled to a solicitor in Norwich, and sat for some eight hours every day behind a lofty deal desk copying deeds and, it may be presumed, making abstracts of title,--a harmless pursuit which a year or two later entirely failed to engage the attention of young Mr.Benjamin Disraeli in Montague Place.

Neither of these distinguished men can honestly be said ever to have acquired what is called the legal mind, a mental equipment which the younger of them had once the effrontery to define as a talent for explaining the self-evident, illustrating the obvious and expatiating on the commonplace.

'By adopting the law,' says Borrow, 'I had not ceased to be Lavengro.' He learnt Welsh when he should have been reading Blackstone.
He studied German under the direction of the once famous William Taylor of Norwich, who in 1821 wrote to Southey: 'A Norwich young man is construing with me Schiller's _William Tell_, with a view of translating it for the press.