Taggart,' said he to the man who sat at the desk, 'this is our excellent correspondent, the friend and pupil of our excellent correspondent.' [Illustration: SIR JOHN BOWRING in 1826 From a portrait by John King now in the National Portrait Gallery.] [Illustration: JOHN P.HASFELD IN 1835 From a portrait by an Unknown Artist formerly belonging to George Borrow] [Illustration: WILLIAM TAYLOR From a portrait by J.Thomson, printed in the year 1821, and engraved in Robberds's _Life of Taylor_.] [Illustration: SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS From a portrait by James Saxon, painted in 1828, now in the National Portrait Gallery.] [Illustration: FRIENDS OF BORROW'S EARLY YEARS] [Transcriber's Note: This is the caption for the page of four portraits, each portrait's caption is shown above.] Phillips explains that he has given up publishing, except 'under the rose,' had only _The Monthly Magazine_, here[56] called _The Magazine_, but contemplated yet another monthly, _The Universal Review_, here called _The Oxford_.

He gave Borrow much the same sound advice that a publisher would have given him to-day--that poetry is not a marketable commodity, and that if you want to succeed in prose you must, as a rule, write trash--the most acceptable trash of that day being _The Dairyman's Daughter_,[57] which has sold in hundreds of thousands, and is still much prized by the Evangelical folk who buy the publications of the Religious Tract Society.

Phillips, moreover, asked him to dine to meet his wife, his son, and his son's wife,[58] and we know what an amusing account of that dinner Borrow gives in _Lavengro_.

Moreover, he set Borrow upon his first piece of hack-work, the _Celebrated Trials_, and gave him something to do upon _The Universal Review_ and also upon _The Monthly_.

_The Universal_ lasted only for six numbers, dying in January 1825.