On his way out to Spain the second time, he happened across Santa Coloma, the Carlist, who is frequently met with hereafter in his Spanish adventures.  “The Bible in Spain” relates very closely the events of the next two years—his wanderings and escapes, his enterprise in Madrid, where he set up a bookselling shop, his imprisonment for insulting the Government and the Catholic Church—an offence of which he was quite innocent, for such was not his method at the time.  The trouble was brought on him by an evangelical firebrand, named Lieutenant Graydon, who led Borrow into one of his scrapes with the Peninsular powers by claiming to be associated with him in the work of the Bible Society.  Borrow’s imprisonment resulted in a declaration by him in the Spanish Press, directed against Graydon.  He said that neither himself nor the Bible Society was actuated by any enmity against either the Government or the Catholic clergy of Spain, and concluded by avowing himself the sole agent of the Society in the Peninsula.  Out of this grew an estrangement between Borrow and the Society.  It happened that Graydon was one of the pets of Mr. Brandram, joint secretary of the Society, and was actually regarded as one of their agents, though he received no pay, being the holder of a Government pension.  He was an enthusiastic evangelist, who seems to have lacked nothing save discretion, but manifested this defect by fierce attacks upon the Catholic faith in its stronghold, instead of contenting himself with prosecuting the primary work of the Society, which was the distribution of the unadulterated Scriptures.  In the event, Graydon was withdrawn from Spain, but it was expressly stated that this step was taken only in the interests of his own safety, and that the Society would pass no judgment on the merits of the dispute between him and Borrow until Graydon had returned to England and had an opportunity of vindicating himself.  Borrow at the same time was ordered to cease issuing his advertisement.  It is difficult to judge a man like Graydon.  His good faith in all he did can hardly be doubted, but there is no question that the result of his ill-timed action was to put an end to the work of the Society and the circulation of the Bible in Spain for many years.

The relations between Earl Street and Borrow grew more strained, and very soon he had practically a command to come to London.  He packed up and returned, but such was the force of his character that he fascinated Earl Street into sending him to Spain a third time.  He was only home a month or two, and got back to the Peninsula on the last day of 1838.  But the mission was not of much further use, for there had been another change of Ministry in the meanwhile, and Borrow and the Society were again out of official favour.

He proceeded to Seville, settling there for a purpose, as we shall presently see.  In the sunlit southern city he was encountered by an English traveller, who has left a most entertaining account of him.  This was Lieutenant-Colonel Elers Napier, in whose “Excursions along the Shores of the Mediterranean” appears the remarkable figure of a Man of Mystery, who is easily identified as Don Jorge—though apparently Napier never learned who he was.  Borrow, six feet three, with piercing black eyes, snowy head, and swarthy, hairless face, made a profound impression on his new friend—and we may be sure that he omitted nothing that would deepen it.  He showed off all his best points and maintained a rigid silence upon the question of his identity, so that in Napier’s recollections he assumes almost supernatural proportions, and is described throughout as “The Unknown.”  He revealed all his miscellaneous acquaintance with languages, Occidental and Oriental.  He conversed with the Colonel in Spanish, in Latin, in French (“the purest Parisian accent”), in Italian.  He spoke English perfectly, but did not appear to be an Englishman.  He was even as conversant with Hindu as the Anglo-Indian himself; he seemed, Napier says, to know everything and everybody, but was apparently known to nobody himself.  His almost magic power over the gypsies, his familiarity with their patois and their customs, the way in which they almost worshipped him when he took Napier by night for a visit to one of their weird encampments, added to the marvel.

But the real significance of the visit to Seville is not to be sought in the archives of the Bible Society or in the jottings of Colonel Napier.  Borrow’s friendship with Mrs. Clarke, of Oulton, arose in the fashion already mentioned.  His long absences from England did not impair it, and in 1838 it developed in peculiar circumstances, which were the subject from time to time of scandal utterly unfounded, and of gossip more or less impertinent and irrelevant.  Whether Borrow, during the years from 1832 to 1838 nurtured dreams of any relation closer than friendship it is hardly possible to determine.  He was not “a marrying man,” and probably the sober little romance that ended in their wedding was a thing of sudden growth.  That theory is encouraged by a passage in his correspondence as late as 1838, when he told his friend Usóz that it was better to suffer the halter than the yoke, and expressed his conviction that bachelordom was the better kingdom for him.  But at the end of the same year, during his stay in England, he visited his friends at Oulton, and found a state of affairs that doubtless altered his judgment.

The business of Mrs. Clarke, who was the principal heiress of the Oulton Hall estate, was in a highly complicated condition.  She had none but professional advisers, save Borrow, and leant with obvious relief upon his friendship to guide her through a puzzling maze of family disputes.  It would be wearisome to attempt to follow the controversies about the disposition of the property.  They finally involved Chancery proceedings, and Dr. Knapp asserts that Mrs. Clarke’s solicitors advised her that it would be well for her to disappear for a time.  The reason for this counsel is obscure, but the fact that it was followed is important.  Mrs. Clarke consulted Borrow about it, with the result that her evanishment took the form of a journey to Spain, accompanied by her daughter Henrietta.  The fact created an amazing quantity of idle speculation and not too generous suggestion.  The plan was arranged in March, 1839.  Borrow was then in Madrid, and immediately posted off to Seville to prepare a house for the reception of the two ladies, having given them some useful hints, drawn from his long experience of Spain, as to the household gods they ought to bring with them.  They arrived in June, and were installed at No. 7, Plazuela de la Pila Seca, which Borrow had modestly furnished and was himself occupying.

He felt surer of his ground than when he was at his wits’ end for employment and subsistence.  Consequently his native impatience of restraint came out.  The Bible Society never gauged their man.  In one despatch to Earl Street, Borrow had said of a certain enterprise that “his usual good fortune accompanied them.”  “This,” replied Mr. Brandram, “is a mode of speaking to which we are not well accustomed; it savours, some of our friends would say, a little of the profane. . . . Pious expressions may be thrust into letters ad nauseam, and it is not for that I plead; but is there not a via media?”  The breach grew wider and severance was ordained; it was consummated very shortly after Borrow’s return to England at the beginning of the next year.

The visit to Tangier occupied some five or six weeks.  Borrow returned to Seville at the end of September, and set to work compiling notes and making transcripts for his book on the Gypsies of Spain.  The enterprise was assisted by diligent friends, such as Bailly, [99a] Usóz, [99b] and Gayangos. [99c]  The fruits of their curious researches among dusty and neglected bookshelves may be seen in the long translations from archaic Spanish authors in “The Zincali.”  It was a Spaniard who invented the epigram on the virtues of old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old books to read.  But we may be excused for excluding from the category of books which have the bouquet of old crusted port the discourses of Dr. Sancho de Moncada and others to which Borrow has treated us so liberally.

He spared time from these labours and from the task of settling up with the Bible Society to pay considerable attention to Mrs. Clarke and “Hen”—the affectionate diminutive given to her daughter Henrietta.  The widow had found Seville, as Borrow promised her it should be, “a most agreeable retreat,” where “the growls of her enemies could scarcely reach her.”  The ladies enjoyed to the full the startling change from the life of the English fens to that of the sunny and many-hued Spanish city.  They realised his prophecy that it would be a delicious existence where, “during the summer and autumn, the people reside in their courtyards, over which an awning is hung.  A very delicious existence it is—a species of dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and flowers.”  And, incidentally, of course, a very fit setting for such love-making as came to be done: the weather is always fine when people are courting, as a modern sage has remarked.  Not much more than a month after his return from Morocco, Borrow had proposed marriage to Mrs. Clarke, and had been accepted.  The arrangement was to a certain extent a “convenient” one for both parties.  With little prospect of further employment by the Bible Society, and only a precarious hold on any profitable literary work, Borrow had no glowing future before him.  Mrs. Clarke felt the need of a man to manage affairs for her at Oulton.  Still, there is ample evidence that this was a fortuitous concourse of circumstances, and that it had little to do with the marriage.  The warm English friendship had become more intimate as the years passed, and there was nothing more natural than this sequel when they were thrown together in the “delightful existence” in which she hid from her “enemies” at Seville.

Having decided to cross the Rubicon, Borrow determined that the sooner it was done the better.  There was to be no “sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”  He began at once to make preparations for the return to England in order that they might be married in their own country.  One of the first steps to be taken to this end was to procure his passport from the Alcalde.  Why this official disapproved of Borrow cannot be affirmed.  As a son of the True Church he may have conceived a prejudice against the Protestant colporteur; he may have been infected by the “spy” mania; he may have been merely anxious to display his own importance.  At any rate, he resolved to give the Ingles rubio as much trouble as possible to remove himself and his party out of Spain.  He raised questions about the validity of Borrow’s papers, refused the passport, and would not be pacified by the offer of fees, “lawful or unlawful,” to quote Borrow, who sent to him apparently under the impression that authority, though a stubborn bear, might be led by the nose with gold, as the clown said to Autolycus.  When Don Jorge himself went to the office to inquire into the matter, he was told to go away.  Instead he continued to investigate the motives of the Alcalde, who thereupon threatened to carry him to prison.  Borrow dared him to do so—and he did it.  This was his third acquaintance with the inside of a Spanish gaol.  He sent a reassuring note to Mrs. Clarke, and had a message taken to the British Consul.  Colonel Napier had noticed earlier in the year that the police kept sharp eyes on Borrow, and attributed it to the suspicion that he was (of all things in the world!) a Russian spy.  There was clearly something in the suggestion that he was under espionage, for while he was in prison his house was searched for papers.  Nothing “compromising” being found, he was released the next night.

His indignation at this outrage reached white heat, and did not die down for months.  His insistence upon redress detained Borrow in the country much longer than he had proposed to stop.  Once having got his knife into Spanish officialdom, he twisted it round till he had gouged out his pound of flesh.  And even then, after he had returned to England, and the knife was no longer available, Spanish officialdom received very severe treatment from that even more terrible weapon, his pen.  From Seville he set working all the diplomatic machinery that an injured Briton could influence; he went to Madrid on the business; he wrote incessantly and exhaustively about it.  His return to England and his marriage had to wait until he had settled accounts with the impertinent Alcalde de Barrio, who had laid sacrilegious hands upon a subject of her Britannic Majesty—and that subject George Borrow.  While ambassadors and consuls and State secretaries were busily employed in official correspondence on his behalf, he proceeded with the work on the “Gypsies,” and did not get away from Spain till April, 1840.

The embarkation of the colporteur and his party upon the Royal Adelaide steamer at Cadiz was an impressive ceremony.  Borrow was taking a long farewell of Spain, and he was not going home without souvenirs of his residence there.  In the previous year he had purchased the Arab horse celebrated in his books as “Sidi Habismilk” (being interpreted, “My Lord Mustard”).  The retinue at Cadiz included not only Mrs. Clarke and Henrietta, but also Sidi Habismilk and Hayim ben Attar, “the Jew of Fez,” Borrow’s servant. [103]  They touched at Lisbon, where General Cordova came on board—not on business of State, but in search of a consignment of cigars that had been sent to him in the care of the captain.  Borrow wrote an amusing sketch of the General and two Secretaries of Legation stowing Havana cigars in their pockets “with all the eagerness of contrabandista.” [104]  The vessel arrived in the port of London on April 16th, and the party put up at the Spread Eagle, in Gracechurch Street.  As soon as the licence could be obtained, the marriage of “George Henry Borrow, bachelor,” with “Mary Clarke, widow,” was celebrated at St. Peter’s Church, Cornhill, and witnessed by John Pilgrim, of Norwich (the bride’s solicitor) and by her daughter Henrietta.  The wedding day was April 23rd.

There remained a very little business to do in London.  He had an interview with the General Purposes Committee of the Bible Society, received a letter from Mr. Brandram, saying that there was no sphere open “to which your services in connection with our Society can be transferred,” and quickly terminated his relations with Earl Street.  In spite of the little differences that had arisen, there was a generous reference to Borrow in the Report of the Society for 1840.  He was said to have succeeded “by almost incredible pains, and at no small cost and hazard,” in his last mission to Spain, and to have assisted in circulating during five years nearly fourteen thousand copies of the Scriptures.  Thus the Bible Society and Don Jorge said good-bye.

At the beginning of May, Mr. and Mrs. Borrow and Miss Clarke went down to Oulton.  The Hall having been let to a farmer, they took up their residence in a little house on the margin of the Broad, known as Oulton Cottage.

CHAPTER VI
THE SUMMER HOUSE AT OULTON

there is everything in favour of the supposition that, in marrying Mrs. Clarke, Borrow wrought better for himself than a man of his temperament usually has an actuarial expectation of doing in matrimony.  Moreover, he did infinitely better than a great number of literary persons who have taken the plunge in similar circumstances.  There was no such tragedy about his marriage as befell his friend and neighbour Edward FitzGerald; indeed, there was no tragedy at all.  Its absence is due to Mrs. Borrow’s remarkable personality, her wifely qualities, unfailing devotion to him in all his fads and moods and whimsies.  She was a perfect “helpmeet”; she provided him with a buffer to absorb some of the shocks of outrageous fortune; she was a patient amanuensis and an indefatigable secretary.

Near the easternmost point of land in England, on the margin of Oulton Broad, in a spot where the roar of the North Sea could be heard, was the cottage in which the best of his remaining years were to be passed.  Here he was to prosecute amid the solemn marshland the eternal search for truth and happiness, and to find that the pursuit was even more difficult for him than for the majority of mankind.  The house contained few rooms, but sufficient for the requirements of the little family, and its quietude and isolation were special recommendations to Borrow in the particular mood in which he then found himself.  The scenery was of a character for which he had strong affection, and the place itself was linked with one or two of the powerful emotions of his youth.  The Broad stretched away from the end of his garden, and he overlooked it from the summer-house he built as a study.  Behind the house: and almost surrounding it, were plantations of pine trees.  For the rest, only an occasional tower or windmill broke the level horizon.  The scene is different, more varied, and much fuller of life at the present day, when the virtues of the Broads as pleasure waters and of the country round as a residential district have been discovered and exploited.  But in certain hours and seasons it is easy to imagine Oulton as George Borrow knew it.

Miss Elizabeth Harvey has left us a picture of Borrow as the friends of this period recalled him. [109]  In his wooden pavilion “on the very margin of the water,” she tells us, “he had many strange old books in various languages.  I remember he once put one before me, telling me to read it.  ‘Oh, I can’t,’ I replied.  He said, ‘You ought: it’s your own language.’  It was an old Saxon book.  He used to spend a great deal of his time in this room, writing, translating, and at times singing strange words in a stentorian voice, while passers-by on the lake would stop to listen with astonishment and curiosity to the singular sounds.”  A note on his personal appearance, by the same hand, may help to keep his figure in mind: “He was six feet three, a splendid man, with handsome hands and feet.  He wore neither whiskers, beard, nor moustache.  His features were very handsome, but his eyes were peculiar, being round and rather small, but very piercing, and now and then fierce.  He would sometimes sing one of his Romany songs, shake his fist at me, and look quite wild.  Then he would ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid of me?’  ‘No, not at all,’ I would say.  Then he would look just as gentle and kind, and say, ‘God bless you, I would not hurt a hair of your head.’”  Here was he, then, when he set up author in real earnest, and induced “glorious John” to publish the first book that resulted from his adventures in foreign parts.  This was “The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, with an Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, and a Copious Dictionary of their Language.”  Most of the compilation—for such it is, and a desultory compilation at that—had been made during his five years in Spain.  It was written at odd times, “chiefly in ventas and posadas, whilst wandering through the country in the arduous and unthankful task of distributing the Gospel among its children.”

In its published form “The Zincali” was an amalgam of several schemes that had occurred to the author from time to time during his Spanish wanderings.  He had projected a collection of the rhymes and proverbial sayings of the gypsies of Spain, inspired thereto by the material he had gathered at Badajoz and Merida, to which additions were made some years later at Seville with the assistance of Juan Antonio Bailly, a French courier with a considerable acquaintance among the Câlé.  He had also proposed a glossary of Câlo and English, which afterwards resolved itself into a limited vocabulary of words occurring in the songs and sayings that he and Bailly had collected.  Both these schemes were imperfectly executed.  Borrow’s knowledge of the Spanish-gypsy language was quite empirical, and Bailly’s collections were either written by illiterate persons, or taken down from the lips of people who spoke a corrupted jargon.  Borrow and Bailly made a large number of translations from obscure Spanish authors—and this was the material from which “The Zincali” was constructed.  He eked it out with a quantity of out-of-the-way information and anecdote acquired during his association with gypsies in England and Russia, and in the course of much miscellaneous browsing among books.  A more unscientific process of writing “An Account of the Gypsies of Spain, etc.,” it would be hard to devise.  There were half a hundred works of more or less utility which he might have consulted, and there is no evidence that he had seen more than a tithe of that number.  But, pari passu, there is certainly no evidence that if he had seen them all he would have produced a better book.  In fact, here, as in every other case, his work does not depend for its charm and its value upon any scientific basis whatever, but upon the idiosyncrasies of Borrow himself, the mordant style, the quaint observation, the atmosphere with which he contrives to invest his subject.  “The Zincali” was read at first, as it is read now, not so much for the accuracy of its history or its philology as for its intrinsic interest as literature.

Having put together at Oulton these notes, memoranda, rhymes, translations, descriptions, and scraps of a gypsy vocabulary, Borrow took the compost to John Murray, who agreed to publish an edition of 750 copies.  The book attracted certain minds attuned to the Borrovian spirit, and it was admitted to display the supreme virtue of originality.  The voice of Murray, above all, was encouraging, and to Borrow that was the voice of the “Mæcenas of British literature.”  In spite of occasional difficulties, he held Mr. Murray in unfailing honour, and was proud to have his work sealed with the cachet of Albemarle Street.  The close association of the Murrays with Richard Ford, whose “Handbook” was long the classic English work on Spain, had important results for Borrow.  Ford was living in retirement at Heavitree, near Exeter—the haven where, half a century later, George Gissing found rest in his last days—and to him the manuscript of “The Zincali” was sent for critical observation.  Ford’s knowledge of Spain was extensive and peculiar, and he immediately perceived in Borrow a man after his own heart, who preferred byways to highways, was full of curious learning, and invariably took the unconventional outlook. [112]  His criticism of the book was what might have been expected.  It took the form of a regret that Borrow had not given his readers more of himself “instead of the extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew nothing about gypsies.”  But, on the whole, both Murray and Ford were pleased.  So were the reviewers.  As to the public, they bought the work very slowly.  It appeared in April, 1841, and by June only three hundred copies had been sold.  Murray explained this genially by declaring that the state of politics had shed a blight over literature; no book was selling, and Borrow’s only shared the fate of the rest.

But before this a new enterprise had been designed.  It was to be an account of Borrow’s personal adventures while engaged in the circulation of the Scriptures in the Peninsula.  The scheme appealed strongly to Ford, and Murray thought well of it.  Ford was “delighted” to know that Borrow meditated such a work.  “The more odd personal adventures the better, and still more so if dramatic; that is, giving the exact conversations.”  “I have given him much advice,” said Ford in a letter to Addington, “to avoid Spanish historians and poetry like prussic acid; to stick to himself, his biography, and queer adventures.”  And Borrow wrote to Ford: “I shall attend to all your advice.  The book will consist entirely of my personal adventures, travels, etc., in that country during five years.  I met with a number of strange characters, all of whom I have introduced; the most surprising of them is my Greek servant, who accompanied me in my ride of 1,500 miles.”  And again: “‘The Bible in Spain’ is a rum, very rum, mixture of gypsyism, Judaism, and missionary adventure, and I have no doubt will be greedily read.”  Here was the impulse from which arose “The Bible in Spain.”

The book which gave Borrow his first and greatest vogue was a compilation based mainly on the letters he had sent home in the form of reports to the Bible Society.  They were unquestionably the most remarkable reports from a literary point of view, and the most unconventional from a religious point of view, that had ever been received by the grave and reverend seniors of Earl Street.  The Society had been staggered once or twice.  Borrow’s confession that he was a little “superstitious,” his reference to the “prophetess” of Manzanares, his “luck”—all these were foreign phrases, and distasteful to the pundits of the Bible Society.  They chid Borrow; but they put up with him until the final disruption, and now, when he applied for permission to use his letters in connection with the new book, they treated him very well.  There were some episodes—the squabble with Graydon among them—for which they were not anxious to secure more publicity, a very natural feeling; but, Borrow giving assurances, they “cheerfully forwarded the letters to him.”

The year 1841 was gloomy, with bad weather and much disease.  It was the year when the murrain first appeared in Great Britain and spread havoc throughout the agricultural districts.  Of all men Borrow was most delicately affected by the moods of Nature round him, most sympathetically attuned—wild and fierce where Nature was fierce and wild, gentle and sunny amid fair meads in fine weather.  And during this miserable year he found it hard to make progress with his writing.  Next spring the change came with a rush, cold and dry, with bright days merging into a glorious summer.  The country called Borrow out.  He tells us that he spent most of his time riding his Arab horse “over heaths and through the green lanes of my native land,” or staying at home and fishing for big pike in the ponds near Oulton Broad, or basking in the sun.  He worshipped Sidi Habismilk, and the horse worshipped his master so manifestly as almost to encourage the belief that Borrow was really a “horse-wizard.”  The Arab followed him about like a dog.  But this magnetism of his was not confined to horses; it was exercised equally over dogs and cats.  Miss Harvey mentions that when Borrow set out from Oulton for a walk, he was often accompanied by two dogs and a cat.  Grimalkin would, of course, be satisfied with much less pedestrianism than her master and the dogs, and would turn back home after a quarter of a mile or so.  These diversions occupied him well into the summer.  It was only when the heat and his own laziness began to remind him of sun-baked Andalusia that the big book came to his mind as a duty to be done.  In actual fact, it would seem that the bulk of the manuscript was in the hands of Murray by the middle of the year in the form of a fair copy made by Mrs. Borrow from the letters and from the new connecting links which the author scribbled, as he says, “higgledypiggledy” on the blank leaves of account-books and the backs of envelopes.

The book was published in December, 1842, and dated 1843.  Ford, whose interest in it was continuous, had given Borrow much advice; he prophesied success.  “Avoid words; stick to deeds,” was his counsel.  There should be no “fine writing,” but plenty of wild adventure, “journals . . . sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles, and the interior of Spanish prisons.”  Borrow was to “avoid rant and cant.  Dialogues always tell; they are dramatic, and give an air of reality.”  With how much fidelity Borrow followed this advice needs no emphasis.  How accurate was Ford’s diagnosis of the public taste the sequel demonstrates.

There was a loud chorus of praise from the literary papers.  Those who had approved “The Zincali” called their readers to witness how they had unerringly detected the trail of true genius.  The Athenæum and the Examiner led the way.  Ford wrote a pæan in the Edinburgh; the Quarterly was sorry it had overlooked the “Gypsies,” but made up for the omission by its reception of “The Bible.”  The author became the lion of the hour; visiting London, he was fêted with ambassadors and “princes and members of Parliament,” as he wrote to his wife.  “On Saturday night I went to a grand soirée, and the people came in throngs to be introduced to me.  To-night I am going to the Bishop of Norwich, to-morrow to another place, and so on.”  He was overwhelmed with congratulations from private friends, among whose letters those of Hasfeldt from St. Petersburg gave him most pleasure.  Six editions of the book were sold in England before the end of the year; it was pirated in America by three houses; it was translated into French, German, and Russian.  Borrow was the most scintillating star in the literary firmament of 1843.

The book deserved its success.  It has all the Borrovian merits and few of the Borrovian defects.  There is the charm of the wonderful style, which is no style at all, the crisp sentence, the unexpected epithet, the penetrating phrase, jumpy and abrupt, but compelling the reader to take the jump and make the sudden halt because it is the only thing to do.  There is the astonishing variety of adventure, of character, of colour, of scene, the wealth of incident, the compelling force of narrative.  Ford said that Borrow “sometimes put him in mind of Gil Blas; [118] but he had not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor did he gild the bad.”  There was, he added, a touch of Bunyan in the way in which, like that enthusiastic tinker, he hammered away at the Devil, or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope.  It was, in fine, such a book as had never been placed in the hands of the public which now read it with tremendous avidity—the public interested in foreign missions, in the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts—in a word, “the religious world.”  “The Bible in Spain” coloured with all the hues of romance the great work of disseminating the Scriptures; it introduced them to new people and to new scenes; it candied the villainies of gypsies with the frosted sugar of evangelical effort, and if it recited strange things of superstitious papists and dubious prophetesses, was not the guide who introduced these matters to them “a devout agent of the Bible Society,” whose end justified all the means he sought?  The “polyglot gentleman” was the most piquant sensation that had ever made its way into thousands of English drawing-rooms.

It was obvious that so great a success must be followed up, and “The Bible in Spain” was hardly in the press before Borrow was pondering a scheme for a book to follow it.  For many reasons, the matter was long in maturing.  The chief of them, probably, was Borrow’s health.  As he grew older, his innate melancholy deepened into hypochondria, from which he emerged occasionally with fits of high-strung merriment.  At forty years of age he had lived three ordinary lives.  He was irritable and eccentric, the irresponsible victim of megrims.  Success did not sweeten life for him.  While he was the literary lion of London, he growled at those who fêted and flattered him as though he would devour them.  He was certainly an admirer of George Borrow himself, and he was not displeased with the flattery; but it left him unsatisfied.  Hasfeldt, with whom he still corresponded, noted his unrest, rallied him, tried to cheer him, adjuring him to philosophy.  But the lack of peace was the effect of a deeper cause than Hasfeldt’s friendly soul could divine; deeper than Borrow himself could plumb.

He became absolutely furious when a railway was taken through his estate and past his house by one of the schemes of Sir Morton Peto.

His first plan was more coherent and more comprehensive than the book in its published form; it was to be an actual autobiography in three volumes, the first to take him to the time of his father’s death, the second to describe his literary life in London and his adventures on the road, and to proceed to his travels abroad; the third to give his adventures in Russia and carry him through a journey in Barbary and Turkey, which yet remained to be undertaken.  The first part of the scheme was faithfully carried out, though Borrow wrote very slowly.  Throughout the early correspondence on the subject with Murray, he referred to the book as “My Life: A Drama.”  It was not till October, 1843, that he mentioned the title “Lavengro: A Biography.”  Next month he told Murray that he had reached his Irish experiences.  “I am now in a blacksmith’s shop in the south of Ireland, taking lessons from the Vulcan in horse-charming and horse-shoe making.”  In January, 1844, he described it in a letter to Dawson Turner, of Yarmouth, the collector of manuscripts, as “a kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style.”  There was much more difficulty in stringing together the “Lavengro” episodes than in editing the letters from Spain.  He was writing from memory of matters twenty or thirty years old, not visualising recent travels with the assistance of documents made on the spot.  Further, he laboured under a sense of the necessity for doing something specially fine in order that his new book might not endanger the reputation he had obtained with his last.  “People will expect so much,” he wrote to Murray.  “I go on . . . scribbling away, though with a palpitating heart.”  Ford, who visited him at Oulton (January, 1844), was enthusiastic about the book, but disapproved of Borrow’s scheme for dropping several years (“the veiled period”—1826 to 1833): “I shall be most anxious,” he wrote, “to hear you tell your own story and recent adventures; but first let us lift up a corner of the curtain over those seven years.”  Borrow was enthusiastic, too, in the intervals of sunshine that lit up his melancholy life.  “‘Lavengro’ progresses steadily, but I am in no hurry.  It is my third book.  Hitherto the public has said: ‘Good!  Better!’  I want it to say to No. 3, ‘Best!’”

It was remarkable that he had been content to remain four years at Oulton, even though the monotony was varied by occasional visits to London and tours through East Anglia on his Arab horse.  The wandering spirit which possessed him from the cradle to the grave had been suppressed with difficulty, and by the aid of circumstances which were inimical to schemes of travel and adventure.  It was not for lack of effort on Borrow’s part that he did not spend those years in going up and down the world and to and fro in it.  He had hardly begun “The Bible in Spain” before he was recommencing the kind of campaign which marked the early ’thirties—worrying Lord Clarendon to get him made a consul or to engage him in some work abroad for the Government.  Lord Clarendon politely told him that it was “quite hopeless” to ask Palmerston for a consulship; and apparently Borrow was unable to make any definite suggestion for the useful employment of his philological learning in any travelling commission on behalf of the nation.  These schemes dropped; he had dreams of settling in Berlin, and others, provoked by Hasfeldt, of studying the sagas in Copenhagen; they were succeeded by visions of travel in North Africa, in search of the wandering sect of the Dar-Bushi-Fal and the witch-hamlet, Char Seharra, to which there are mysterious references in the sixth chapter of “The Zincali.”  But none of these enterprises came to a head, and he performed the uncongenial role of a stay-at-home till, having worked just over a year upon the manuscript of “Lavengro,” he suddenly determined to take a prolonged tour abroad.  Starting on April 23rd, 1843, he proceeded by way of Paris to Strasburg and Vienna, travelled through Hungary, Transylvania, and Rumania to Bucharest, across the Danube, and from Rustchuk to Constantinople, where he was in September.  Thence he went to Salonika, through Thessaly and Albania to Prevesa, afterwards visiting Corfu and Venice, returning by Rome, Marseilles, Paris, and Havre to London, which he reached in the middle of November.  Dr. Knapp gives the itinerary.  This is one of the few expeditions of which Borrow left no records save those worked into late editions of “The Zincali” and into the Hungarian’s narrative in “The Romany Rye.”

“This is a regular Patmos, an ultima Thule, placed in an angle of the most unvisited, out-of-the-way portion of England.  His house hangs over a lonely lake covered with wild fowl, and is girt with dark firs, through which the wind sighs sadly.  However, we defy the elements, and chat over las cosas de Espana, and he tells me portions of his life, more strange even than his book.  We scamper by day over the country in a sort of gig, which reminds me of Mr. Weare on his trip with Mr. Thurtell (Borrow’s old preceptor).  ‘Sidi Habismilk’ is in the stable and a zamarra now before me, writing as I am in a sort of summer-house, called La Mezquita, in which El Gitano concocts his lucubrations, and paints his pictures, for his object is to colour up and poetise his adventures.”

After Ford had left, Borrow wrote to him a letter [126a] which provides an interesting glimpse at the process of composition of “Lavengro”:

“An Batuscha,—I have got your letter, which I should have answered sooner had I not been to Yarmouth—not, however, to the house of the Armenian.  Thank you for the pheasants and the caviare which you were kind enough to send.  Almost as soon as I got back from Norwich the weather became disagreeable—a strange jumble of frost, fog, and wet.  I am glad that during your stay there it has been a little more favourable.  My wife is better, and left her room, but poor Henrietta is in bed with the same complaint.  I still keep up, but not exactly the thing.  You can’t think how I miss you in our chats by the fireside.  The wine, now I am alone, has lost its flavour, and the cigar makes me ill.  I am very frequently by the Valley of the Shadow, and, had I not summers and jaunts to look forward to, I am afraid it would be all up with your friend, su Batuscha.

“I still go on with my life, but slowly, lazily.  What I write is, however, good.  I feel it is good: strange and wild as it is.  I expect to be in London by the beginning of March, and hope there to write your review [126b] and receive a cheque from Murray to the tune of some hundreds.  The colt is, however, not bought yet.  My wife has set her face against it, and at present I do not like to press the matter.  She is in delicate health, and believes she has dreamt it would either kill her or me.  At present I may truly call myself el necio de la casa, pero veremos vir.  She much regrets not having seen you.

“When I go to London upon whom would you advise me to call?  Who is worth knowing?  Now that the old man is dead, I am afraid that a certain street will not be quite so agreeable as it was.  Did the gypsies tell you where they lived?  If I knew I would go and visit them.  I suppose somewhere about Tottenham Court.

“As I returned from Norwich I stopped at Thurton and tasted the wine.  It was really good.  When you are next past that way you must taste it yourself, and give me your opinion.  I hope . . . having found your way to these parts you will frequently favour us with your company.  God bless you.  Ever yours,

“George Borrow.

“Muchismas espresiones de la parti de mi esposa y de la Henriqueta.”

CHAPTER VII
“LAVENGRO” AND HIS CRITICS

In connection with this episode, as may be imagined, several persons were placed upon Borrow’s index.  Lockhart himself soon got there.  When Ford’s “Handbook for Spain” appeared, the author was exceedingly anxious that Borrow should write the article on it for the Quarterly Review.  No man could have done it with ampler knowledge or invested it with more absorbing interest than “El Gitano,” as Lockhart dubbed him in the correspondence on the subject.  But the essay Borrow produced, written in ill-health, and betraying all the evidences of a jaundiced and embittered mind, was in no sense a review of Ford’s book.  It was a long screed against those persons and tendencies in Spanish politics that aroused his ire.  The extract given by Dr. Knapp is in the very best invective style of the Appendix.  Lockhart behaved exceedingly well in the matter.  He would publish the article in the Quarterly if Borrow would permit him to insert extracts from Ford’s book in suitable places, so that the reader might be able to obtain some glimmering of the author’s style and subject.  Borrow petulantly replied that he would not have the paper tampered with.  Lockhart then very properly exercised his editorial authority, and refused to publish it.  He softened the decision by suggesting that Borrow’s work would make an admirable magazine article, mentioning periodicals that would be glad to have it.  The suggestion was not adopted, the article remained in proof-sheet in the hands of Murray, and Lockhart was numbered among the increasing army of Borrow’s mortal enemies.  It was an unhappy sequel to this incident that the friendship between Ford and Borrow cooled off, and their intercourse ceased altogether a few years later—by no desire of Ford’s, as the correspondence shows.

More trouble arose from the obscure dispute with Bowring, in which Borrow accused him of palming off upon the House of Commons as his own the Manchu-Tartar version of the Scriptures that Borrow had printed at St. Petersburg, in order to get for himself the consulship at Canton, while at the same time affecting to promote the candidature of Borrow for the post.  To any impartial mind the evidence in favour of this theory is scanty, and the theory itself improbable.  That Borrow believed it there can be no doubt; it tinged his life with added gall and wormwood, and helped to divert the course and purpose of his book.  A further grievance was the failure of the British Museum trustees to get the funds for a mission to the Convent of St. Catharine on Sinai in search of the manuscript of the fourth-century Greek Testament, afterwards acquired by Tischendorf for Alexander II. of Russia.  But it would be tiresome to follow all the convolutions of Borrow’s tempers and jealousies throughout these troubled years.  They are amply reflected in many portions of the literary work he was doing.

Time drifted, and it was 1848 before Murray could make a definite announcement about “Lavengro.”  In that year appeared in his “list of new works in preparation” the following:—“‘Lavengro’: An Autobiography.  By George Borrow, author of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ etc. 3 vols., post 8vo.”  In October the first volume went to press, and then there was more vacillation about the title of the book.  It was advertised in the Quarterly Review and the Athenæum in November, and December as “Life: A Drama.”  That form was immediately dropped.  Borrow was taken ill and work ceased.  In July, 1849, the old advertisement describing it as an autobiography was restored, though we well know now that by this time it had ceased to be autobiographical in the conventional sense.  Finally the pangs of labour ended with the year 1850, and “Lavengro—The Scholar—The Gypsy—The Priest” was delivered to the reading world and to the tender mercies of the critics in February, 1851.

Yet, in fact, “Lavengro” is little else.  It followed faithfully the original plan throughout the first volume.  Then came Borrow’s journey in the East and his return to accumulate hatreds, nurse revenges, and conduct wordy war with the battalions of his imaginary foes.  And, in order to vent his spleen upon them, he deliberately altered the tenour of his book.  The episodes of travel on the English roads were already protracting themselves beyond manageable length when events occurred that determined him to reject the whole scheme of the two remaining volumes first designed, and to extend these episodes still further so as to drag in some of his pet aversions and exhibit them in a disgraceful or ridiculous light.  Particularly did he pour forth the vials of his wrath upon Bowring, the Old Radical, inserting the incident of the postilion and his story specially for the purpose.

But while Borrow was down in the summer-house at Oulton writing marvellous pages on odd scraps of paper, probing profound depths of speculation, and rising to the dizziest heights of natural eloquence, while he allowed himself to be possessed and fascinated by the gypsies and the jockeys, the tramps and the wastrels, the thimble-engroes and the pugilists, and all the weird company that defile through the haunting pages of his book, while the development of Catholic missions in England diverted his ultra-Protestant mind to the machinations of mythical Jesuits and gave him the figure of the Man in Black; while he piled rage and scorn upon the devoted head of John Bowring, who added to his other sins against the Borrovian covenant a characteristically Unitarian indifference to the “No Popery” cry [132]—all this time “Lavengro” was not making much progress with his life, the publisher was appealing to him to hurry, and the hungry printer was sending up pitiable cries for “copy.”  Borrow, having gone off on a branch line, utterly declined to return.  He had occupied nearly two volumes in describing the events of a few months—from his descent upon London and Sir Richard Phillips to his sojourn in Mumper’s Dell.  He was in the middle of the postilion’s story, wherein the Old Radical was receiving his shrewdest knocks, when Murray issued his ultimatum, and Mrs. Borrow was despatched to London with the last of the manuscript (November, 1850).  He had been obliged to break off abruptly, for Murray threatened, if the book were not finished there and then, to “throw it up.”  Promising himself to complete the narrative in a sequel, Borrow left “Lavengro” as we have it now.  The reviewers and the reading world, instead of the autobiography in common form which they had been led to expect, received a picaresque hotch-potch about which the best they could find to say was that it was “remarkable.”

The almost unanimous verdict of the critics was highly unfavourable.  The Athenæum (whose review was written by Dilke) spoke of the warm expectations that had been raised and the great disappointment that was felt; Fraser, in which William Stirling (Sir William Stirling-Maxwell) discussed it, was vigorously satirical about Borrow’s trivial mystifications, his dashes, dots, and asterisks; Blackwood was “sick of the Petulengros and their jargon,” and its reviewer acutely perceived the internal evidence of the changes in plan and disposition which had been made while the work was in progress.  The two persons who found anything good to say about the book were friends of Borrow—Dr. Gordon Hake and Mr. W. B. Donne.  It is curious that these were the only reviewers who displayed much prescience in their criticism.  Hake took the bold course of prophecy: “Lavengro’s” roots, he said, would strike deep into the soil of English letters.  Donne perceived that, as he said, the public had been looking for a second Marco Polo, and were presented instead with a nineteenth-century Defoe.

In spite, however, of all that could be said in its favour, the public would have none of “Lavengro.”  Three thousand copies of the first edition were printed.  Notwithstanding Murray’s confident prophecy that it would find a ready sale, it fell almost lifeless, and twenty-one years passed before another edition was called for.  It is a little difficult to understand the attitude of the public and the Press towards a work which, in spite of its obvious faults, is one of the most virile and most entrancing works of English literature.  The true explanation is to be found in the theory suggested by Mr. Watts-Dunton.  “Lavengro” was a complete failure, he said, and its reception by the Press, the accusations of “lowness and vulgarity,” embittered Borrow.  Why was it that the public of that day considered such books as “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” to be low and vulgar?  The fact was that “Lavengro,” issuing forth in the year of the great Exhibition, made its bow before the most genteel and most philistine age of Victorian literature.  A writer hardly dared to admit that a man was a man or a woman a woman.  We have arrived at the other extreme in the process of emancipating ourselves from philistinism, and there is no excuse in Art or Nature for many of the books written and published at the present time.  But the reception of “Lavengro” was largely due to the mawkish sentiment against which Borrow hysterically declaimed as “gentility-nonsense,” and we have fortunately outgrown it.  In time readers came to see the extraordinary merits of Borrow’s books; they bought them as they were re-issued, read them, liked them, and will go on reading and liking them.  Gypsyism has, in fact, become popular in the genteelest circles.

Many years ago Mr. Watts-Dunton succeeded in throwing a gleam of light upon Borrow’s own view of the work.  He tells us how, when they were discussing the question of the real nature of autobiography, Borrow exclaimed, “What is an autobiography?  Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man’s life, or is it a picture of the man himself—his character, his soul?”  And Mr. Watts-Dunton adds observations applying the inference to Borrow’s book.  He points out what we have already seen—that he sat down to write his own life in “Lavengro,” and that in the first volume he did almost confine himself to matters of fact.  “But, as he went on, he clearly found that the ordinary tapestry into which destiny had woven the incidents of his life was not tinged with sufficient depth of colour to satisfy his sense of wonder.  When he wishes to dive very boldly into the ‘abysmal deeps of personality,’ he speaks and moves partly behind the mask of some fictitious character.”  “Let it be remembered,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “that it was this instinct of wonder, not the instinct of the mere poseur, that impelled him to make certain exaggerated statements about the characters themselves that are introduced into his books.”

This view of the eccentricities and purple patches of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye” is interesting, and certainly just to a point.  It does not account for the whole of the leaps that Borrow took in one direction and another; it does not explain Mr. Platitude, or the Man in Black, or the Old Radical.  The reason for their creation has been already stated.  The “instinct of wonder,” the Celtic imagination, now brooding, now soaring, does, however, explain much in the books that cannot be explained by reference to actual facts of the author’s career, and does justify in a sense his theory of autobiography—that the truest self-revelation may be found not so much in the mere recital of bare facts as in the impression of the form of his thought, and in the reflection of the colours that glow in his soul.

While Borrow was at Oulton struggling with the composition of “Lavengro,” quarrelling with the vicar, denouncing Sir Morton Peto, procrastinating with his publisher, and passing some of the most miserable, if the most fruitful years of his life, he made an acquaintance which ripened into an important and valuable friendship.  The Misses Harvey introduced the Borrows to Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, then resident as a physician at Bury St. Edmund’s—the friendly critic of “Lavengro” already mentioned.  Visits were paid and repaid by the two families at Bury and at Oulton, and a close association and familiarity grew up.  Dr. Hake thus becomes one of the most trustworthy and most interesting authorities on this portion of Borrow’s life, and relates many exceedingly suggestive stories illustrating the varied and strangely contradictory phases of Borrow’s character.  His sketch of the personality of his friend, inscribed in his “Memoirs,” has often been quoted.  Its principal value is that it brings out with the authority of a medical man the cause of much that frequently seems inexplicable in Borrow—his native hypochondria, and the reason for his violent antipathy towards society, and especially “genteel” society: “Society he loved and hated alike; he loved it that he might be pointed out and talked of; he hated it because he was not the prince he felt himself in its midst.”  I refer again in this connection to the view proffered to me by Mr. Watts-Dunton, gleaned from intercourse with Borrow at a later period of his life, that his denunciation of respectability and “gentility-nonsense” was simply by way of revenge upon the Philistines; that he loved real respectability and good repute, worshipped fame and success, and equally hated insignificance and failure.

Dr. Hake’s anecdotes illustrate his impatience of much of the kind of fame and notice he attracted, the outbursts of violence with which he greeted people who did not appeal to him, and the intensity of his egoism.  Poor Agnes Strickland was anxious to be introduced to him, and, after expressing her great admiration of his books, she begged to be allowed to send him a copy of her “Queens of England.”  Borrow cried, “For God’s sake don’t, madam; I should not know what to do with them.”  And, getting up, he said to Mr. Donne, of the London Library, who had introduced the ill-assorted pair, “What a d— fool that woman is!”  There was Mrs. Bevan, the wife of the Suffolk banker, with whom he went to dine, Dr. Hake being of the company.  Borrow knew that the bank had dealt, as he thought, rigorously with a friend who was in financial straits.  Mrs. Bevan, who, of course, had no responsibility in this matter, sat next to Borrow at dinner.  Dr. Hake describes her as “a simple, unpretending woman, desirous of pleasing him,” which she sought to do by describing the pleasure with which she had read his books.  “Pray, what books do you mean, madam?” said Borrow.  “Do you mean my account-books?”  And he rose from the table, walking up and down the room during dinner, and wandered about the house till the carriage was ordered.  There was Thackeray, whom he met at Hardwicke House, in Suffolk.  Thackeray ventured to ask him whether he had read the “Snob Papers” in Punch.  “In Punch?” said Borrow.  “It is a periodical I never look at!”

Instances of his boorishness could be multiplied, but it is sufficiently proved.  Let us see what there is on the other side of the account.

There is a tale told by Mr. Ewing Ritchie [140] which illustrates the fact that Borrow thoroughly detested the practice of snubbing—when he witnessed it as a third person.  A clergyman at the supper table at Oulton Hall (then let to a tenant who was a Nonconformist) made an onslaught upon a young Independent minister for holding Calvinistic opinions.  The occasion of this Christian dispute was the more appropriate as they had all just returned from an undenominational meeting of the Bible Society, at which Borrow had made a speech.  The minister stood up to the cleric, and told him that the Thirty-nine Articles to which he had sworn assent were Calvinistic.  The reply to this was that there was a mode of explaining away the Articles: we were not bound to take the words “in their natural sense.”  The young Nonconformist confessed that he did not understand that way out of the difficulty, and subsided.  Then Borrow stepped into the fray, “opening fire on the clergyman,” says Mr. Ritchie, “in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting-down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot.  All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, and the clergyman was beaten at every point.”  The comment of the young minister to Mr. Ritchie was, “Never did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.”  It was very like to be tremendous when Borrow had his Protestant bonnet on and at the same time thought he saw a member of the Church he loved making himself ridiculous.

The interview between Borrow and the Rev. Whitwell Elwin has been previously mentioned (p. 52).  “What party are you in the Church?” he suddenly exclaimed to the Rector of Booton.  “Tractarian, Moderate, or Evangelical?  I am happy to say I am the old High.”  “I am happy to say I am not,” replied Elwin.  A conversation thus begun with unpromising differences of opinion about the ethics of review-writing, and continued in an atmosphere of theological disputation, would ordinarily have ended in a violent quarrel.  Borrow must have been in an especially benignant mood that day, for he allowed Elwin to throw aspersions upon his pronunciation of the Norfolk dialect, and yet did not bring the séance to a conclusion with lightning in his eyes, thunder on his brows, and storms of invective flowing from his eloquent tongue.  “Borrow boasted,” says Elwin, “of his proficiency in the Norfolk dialect, which he endeavoured to speak as broadly as possible.  I told him that he had not cultivated it with his usual success.”  But the clouds cleared, the protagonists became warm friends, and promised to visit each other.  It does not appear that Elwin ever went to Oulton, but Borrow did go to Booton, exerted himself to please his hosts by calling upon his stores of anecdote and adventure, and entranced the children of the rectory by singing gypsy songs to them.  It will be remembered that Elwin was then editing the Quarterly Review as deputy for Lockhart.  He begged Borrow to “try his hand at an article for the Review.”  But Borrow was far too sore with reviews and reviewers to entertain such a proposal; the incident of Ford’s “Handbook,” too, was recent.  “Never!” he cried.  “I have made a resolution never to have anything to do with such a blackguard trade!”

The Booton episode is related mainly because it offers an opportunity of referring to a trait of Borrow which has been the subject of strange misrepresentation.  Dr. Jessopp wrote for the Daily Chronicle [142] a review of a new edition of “The Romany Rye,” in which the following remarkable passage occurred:

“Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes.  Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee.  He was beardless; his voice was not the voice of a man.  His outbursts of wrath never translated themselves into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered in that sad heart of his.  Those big bones and huge muscles and the strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud of.  How if he were the Narses of literature—one who could be only what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not something more?”

One does not care to discuss the principal suggestion here involved, save to say that there is not a tittle of evidence to support it, that it cannot be believed by any student of some of the most robust and most virile works in the English language, and that the alleged facts upon which it is based have been categorically contradicted by Mr. Thomas Hake (the eldest son of Dr. Gordon Hake) in an interesting letter to Mr. Watts-Dunton. [143]  This gentleman, the author of several novels, who knew more of Borrow than anyone else, must not be confounded with his younger brother, Mr. Egmont Hake (mentioned on page 8), the well-known author of “The Story of Chinese Gordon.”  It will be a great pity if Mr. Thomas Hake does not give us his reminiscences of the author of “Lavengro.”  One point, however, of Dr. Jessopp’s impeachment of Borrow may be taken up without offence.  There is not a hint, says Dr. Jessopp, that Borrow “ever kissed a woman or ever took a little child upon his knee.”  It is a new demand upon biographers that they shall record, even by way of hint, the osculatory adventures of their heroes, and possibly the best reply is that there is certainly no hint that he never kissed a woman, and there is plenty of testimony to the fact that he was no misogynist.  But if a hint will suffice it may be found in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s account of the conversation between them and the gypsy woman Perpinia, whom he warned against smoking tobacco while she was suckling an infant: “It ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow.  “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!”  The inference is so obvious that one need not pursue the argument by inversion of the story.  When one comes to Dr. Jessopp’s picture of Borrow in his relation to children, however, there is a large quantity of direct evidence gathered from many quarters which proves it to be erroneous.  Mr. Thomas Hake, in the letter just cited, says: