My impression is that Borrow in his wandering after old volumes on crime for his great compilation, _Celebrated Trials_, came across the French translation of Klinger's novel published at Amsterdam.

From that translation he acknowledges that he borrowed the plate which serves as frontispiece--a plate entitled 'The Corporation Feast.' It represents the corporation of Frankfort at a banquet turned by the devil into various animals.

It has been erroneously assumed that Borrow had had something to do with the designing of this plate, and that he had introduced the corporation of Norwich in vivid portraiture into the picture.

Borrow does, indeed, interpolate a reference to Norwich into his translation of a not too complimentary character, for at that time he had no very amiable feelings towards his native city.

Of the inhabitants of Frankfort he says: They found the people of the place modelled after so unsightly a pattern, with such ugly figures and flat features, that the devil owned he had never seen them equalled, except by the inhabitants of an English town called Norwich, when dressed in their Sunday's best.[61] In the original German version of 1791 we have the town of Nuremberg thus satirised.