his name being so seldom heard, there is some danger of the right people going to their graves without encountering him,a mischance that cannot be contemplated easily by any right-thinking man." It may be that the excuse is not so good as it was, for Borrow's work has been several times reprinted since then, and the little company of his friends has undoubtedly grown. Let us take refuge in the fact that his centenary is barely past; and that some fresh mention of him in these pages is therefore only a little overdue.

If Borrow opens a new world to the right people, it is not a world into which mere wandering led him. One finds little indication of his genius in the fact of those early roving experiences of his. The newspapers remind us daily how ordinary, as recorded fact, extraordinary conduct is. In his own time Borrow's exploits were barely a nine days' wonder; now they would not be thought worthy of remark. The slum, the dive, the hell, the joint, are among the popular exhib its of our Vanity Fair, and it is easy to get a respectable guide. Also, we have learned to fare forth, with notebooks, along the trail of the gypsy or the hobo, and to make a show-place of his most retired habitat. Borrow's motive differentiates him from us, to be sure. not a reporter or a student. He did not look forward to a Ph. D. in sociology, or to a display of higher journalism. His wayside studies in ethnology and philology were even less serious than he took them to be. The simple truth is that he had an instinct for vagabondage, and could not keep away from it. It was a part of him, and, as his talent was primarily autobiographical, it went far toward determining the substance of his work. But it is the world in Borrow which gives enchantment to the world through which he moved. If there are no new facts under the sun, there is, thank Heaven, no dearth of new personalities in the light of which the old facts continue to serve admirably.

He was

George Borrow was born in July, 1803, of decent Cornish stock. His father was a captain of militia, a sturdy, simpleminded Briton, whose pride was to have been for one glorious day the conqueror of Big Ben, champion bruiser of all England. The son was also strong of frame and able with his fists, but there was nothing else about him for the father to understand. He bore, indeed, many of the marks of the ne'er-do-weel. He left undone many things which, from the parental point of view, he ought to have done, and did many things which he ought not to have done. He neglected his Greek for Irish, he neglected law for the company of law-breakers, and he preferred the acquaintances to be made in an inn or a stable to those which a respectable provincial drawing-room could afford. Yet there was much health in him. He went his own way not through viciousness, but through a hardy independence of nature. Unfortunately the world - and parents have to make a rule of discountenancing irregularity and insubordination, because these are, in the ordinary instance, signs of moral and mental weakness. So, by this lamentable chance, it comes about that extraordinary exertions of force often look quite like the commonest laxities. It is easy enough to see now that Borrow was simply going about his business. He did not himself understand what that business was, and had even a quaint sympathy with the paternal disapproval. For whom shall we feel the greater sympathy as we listen to the last interview reported between Lavengro and the stout captain?

himself in, after a walk of twenty miles. I entered a well-lighted passage, and from thence a well-lighted bar-room, on the right hand, in which sat a stout, comely, elderly lady dressed in silks and satins, with a cambric coif on her head, in company with a thin, elderly man with a hat on his head, dressed in a rather prim and precise manner. 'Madam,' said I, bowing to the lady, as I suppose you are the mistress of this establishment, I beg leave to inform you that I am an Englishman walking through these regions in order fully to enjoy their beauties and wonders. I have this day come from Llangollen, and being somewhat hungry and fatigued, hope I can be accommodated here with a dinner and a bed.'

"Sir,' said the lady, getting up and making me a profound curtsey, 'I am as you suppose the mistress of this establishment, and am happy to say that I shall be able to accommodate you pray sit down, sir,' she continued, handing me a chair. You must indeed be tired, for Llangollen is a great way from here.'"

All of the writing which brought Borrow fame was done after his marriage. The Zincali (1841) lacked the vigor and discursiveness of the later books, but its theme was fresh, and its style had an odd tang of its own which caught not a few ears in Europe and elsewhere. The author was advised of his faults, and urged to do something better; and the something better which resulted was The Bible in Spain. A remarkable passage in one of his prefaces describes his manner of composing the book; it is in Borrow's characteristic style: —

"Mistos amande: I am content, I replied, and sitting down I commenced The Bible in Spain. At first I proceeded slowly, - sickness was in the land, and the face of nature was overcast, heavy rain-clouds swam in the heavens, the blast howled in the pines

...

which nearly surround my lonely dwelling, and the waters of the lake which lies before it, so quiet in general and tranquil, were fearfully agitated. 'Bring lights hither, O Hazim Ben Attar, son of the miracle!' And the Jew of Fez brought in the lights, for though it was midday I could scarcely see in the little room where I was writing.. A dreary summer and autumn passed by and were succeeded by as gloomy a winter. I still proceeded with the Bible in Spain. The winter passed, and spring came with cold dry winds and occasional sunshine, whereupon I arose, shouted, and mounting my horse, even Sidi Habismilk, I scoured all the surrounding district, and thought but little of the Bible in Spain.

"Then came the summer with much heat and sunshine, and then I would lie for hours in the sun and recall the sunny days I had spent in Andalusia, and my thoughts were continually reverting to Spain, and at last I remembered that the Bible in Spain was still unfinished; whereupon I arose and said, This loitering profiteth nothing, and I hastened to my summer-house by the side of the lake, and there I thought and wrote, and every day I repaired to the same place, and thought and wrote until I had finished the Bible in Spain."

This is highly imaginative writing, though Borrow probably was conscious of giving nothing more than a simple autobiographical item. There is an odd reminder of Poe in it; the opening lines might almost be taken from The Fall of the House of Usher, or is it "the dank tarn of Auber" of which this ominously agitated English lake reminds one?

The Bible in Spain was taken seriously by the English reviews. Borrow found himself compared to Le Sage, Bunyan, ard Cervantes; the critic who pleased him most was the one who called the book "a Gil Blas in water colours." As a mere narrative of travels it would have gained a wider hearing than such

books can now hope for. It appeared during a dark age of English and American intelligence with regard to foreign lands and peoples. If we still manage to be reasonably ignorant of such matters, it is not because we have lacked the chance to learn. Just then even the European world lay dark to our eyes, and we were only beginning to ask for light. Americans were eager for the chance rays of Irving, and Englishmen were ready to look upon the unaccustomed scenes which Borrow brought before them.

This collocation of names suggests an odd contrast. The Tales of the Alhambra were published in 1832, and The Bible in Spain ten years later. Irving and Borrow must have been in Spain at nearly the same time; both were there primarily on other than literary business; both presently turned their experiences to literary account. Here the resemblance ends. Irving was the senior by twenty years, a writer of established reputation, a man of elegant tastes. He was loyal to the theory of democracy, but breathed comfortably only in the air of what Borrow called "gentility." He had a quick eye for the picturesque and the romantic, and a discreet blindness for the squalid and the obscene. He found in Spain a mighty treasure of romance, a tradition of past greatness, striking relics of the Moorish occupancy, a national temperament still full of grace and color. So he wrote The Tales of the Alhambra.

Borrow was an unknown hack-writer, a man of singular life and violent opinion, by instinct a democrat, and by practice a vagabond. Spain was not a land of romantic glamour to him. It was a land of gross ignorance and superstition, of duplicity, of kind hearts, of pleasantly various dialects, of engrossing wayside encounters. These are the materials from which the fabric of The Bible in Spain is wrought. How much weight the element of information had with Bor

row's audience is shown by the remark of a contributor to Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature after the appearance of Lavengro and The Romany Rye: "These works are inferior in interest to his former publications, but are still remarkable books." The public was not prompt in recognizing the pure genius of this English colporteur and student of gypsies.

I do

That genius found, of course, its best expression in Lavengro and its sequel, which together form one of the strangest narratives the world has known. not mean that it seems to me queer; the strange thing about it is its spontaneity. Nobody can feel that Borrow had to choose between modes of expression; it was discursive autobiography or nothing for him. Nor does there seem to have been possible question as to the period which he should record. At the end of The Romany Rye he has reached his twenty-fourth year. Of the next seven years he never gave any account, alluding to it as "the veiled period." One or two intimations he let fall as to extensive traveling, which must have been done, if at all, during this interval. His editor and biographer (Professor Knapp, an American) thinks this time was spent at dreary hack-work which he wished to forget and to have forgotten. However this may be, there is no doubt that the Lavengro narrative gives a full and fairly accurate account of the first twenty-three years of the author's life. During his later years, Borrow chose to assert, and to reassert, with a good deal of heat, that the narrative "was not what is generally termed an autobiography." Why he made so sweeping an assertion nobody knows. The researches of his biographer have shown that in its original manuscript form the narrative was frankly personal, and that the changes which he afterwards made to give it an impersonal turn were as slight as they could well be. That his characters were all drawn from the life, moreover, is a fact which has

been placed beyond doubt. What Borrow did, saw, felt, and was: these are the themes which give his work value.

...

This he never fully understood, or we should have been spared not only the unhappy Appendix of which I shall have to speak, but a good deal of material which obstructs the free course of his narrative. It is irritating that the Man in Black should be allowed to intrude upon so many of the precious moments which we have to spend in Mumper's Dingle with Lavengro and the glorious Isopel. It is well enough to be invited to hate the Pope of Rome, but there are moments when we should prefer simply to ignore him. Borrow prided himself on being a champion of Protestantism, a scholar, a philosopher. He was none of these, but a writer of unique genius; and upon this fact, if he suspected it, he prided himself not at all. Consequently, when his book is attacked, he sets himself to defend it as a work in theology, or philology, or morals. "Those who read this book with attention. may derive much information with respect to matters of philology and literature; it will be found treating of most of the principal languages from Ireland to China, and of the literature which they contain; and it is particularly minute with regard to the ways, manners, and speech of the English section of the most extraordinary and mysterious clan or tribe of people to be found in the whole world, - the children of Roma. But it contains matters of much more importance than anything connected with philology, and the literatures and manners of nations. Perhaps no work was ever offered to the public in which the kindness and Providence of God have been set forth by more striking examples, or the machinations of priestcraft been more truly and lucidly exposed, or the dangers which result to a nation that abandons itself to effeminacy, and a rage for what is novel and fashionable, than the present."

when it is done. Was there ever a more extraordinary begging of the question? Of the voluminous commentary upon himself and his critics, from which I have just quoted (there are eleven chapters of it printed as an Appendix to The Romany Rye), one need only say that it shows him at his worst. His creative work was spontaneous and sound; but he was neither graceful nor convincing as a controversialist. There is open rancor with unstinted Billingsgate in this extraordinary effusion: an indiscriminate damning of gentility, Popery, Toryism, Whiggery, teetotalism, Jacobitism, Wellington - worship, and, in general, "the thousand and one cants and species of nonsense prevalent in England." It is not pretty to read or comfortable to remember. The truth is, Borrow never knew what was important in his own work; and when it was received with acrimony, on minor counts, among various classes of sticklers for the conventional, he was indiscreet enough to retort in kind. He had plenty of bees in his bonnet; it is lucky that they did not make greater havoc.

As a work of pure literature, Lavengro and its sequel needed no defense; they constitute a sort of English Odyssey of the Road. The hero has the Odyssean craft and power of arm, and a wholly English integrity; he goes his way as the wind blows, without fear or favor. What talk, what ale, what scenes, what blows! And what amazing figures: the Flaming Tinman, Mrs. Hearne, who “ comes of the hairy ones," Mr. Petulengro the inconsequential, the postilion, Francis Ardry, the apple-woman, there is no end to them, unless (and she ought to be the beginning) we make an end with the name of the great Isopel Berners. Her real name was Bess, late authorities say; I shall continue to love her as Isopel. I can forgive Lavengro anything else, even his Armenian verbs, but never his clumsi