Walling, ‘George Borrow, the Man and His Work’ (1908)
We have read of his Cornish father’s prowess in “the art of fisticuffery,” and might certainly have looked for a spirited account of
the affair at Bodmin Bridge when the terror of all Plymouth and Devonport was vanquished, and another of the fracas at Menheniot Fair. But we should probably also have had an essay upon an art which has always been far more popular in Cornwall than boxing—that is, the art of wrestling.
We may be sure he would have expressed his patriotic preference for the Cornish over the Devonshire style. He might have agreed with Touchstone that “breaking ribs” was not sport for ladies, but he would have regretted its decline because it was a vigorous and manly game, and he would have fastened upon the career of the great wrestler Polkinghorne, whose contest with the Devonshire hero Cann, on Tamar Green at Devonport in 1826, was a Homeric battle worthy the pen of him who discoursed of that great fight in which Thurtell was “lord of the concourse.” He would have given us the true inwardness of “the Cornish hug” and the “Flying Mare,” and might even have cited the ballad of Will Treffry and Little Jan, whose untimely end left sorrowing the lady who was to have been his bride that very day:
“Then, with a desperate toss,
Will showed the Flying Hoss,
And Little Jan fell on the tan,
And never more he spake.
Oh, Little Jan, alack!
The ladies say, Oh, woe’s the day!
Oh, Little Jan, alack!”
But most of all do I miss such a treatise as should have grown out of his exploration of the Tintagel country, speculating in what degree he would have adopted the Cornish theory of Arthur, what he would have made of the mass of tradition and romance that has collected about that stretch of coast. One may imagine how his mind would have followed the legend of Arthur from its birthplace in the Far North down through his beloved Wales to the spot on which he stood before the crumbling walls of Dundagil, out of whose silent ruins Tennyson’s imagination was about to construct his marvellous picture of the stately halls of Camelot.