Born, at East Dereham, 5 July 1803. Educated at Norwich Grammar School, 1815–18. Family changed place of residence constantly, 1803–20. Articled to Solicitor in Norwich, 1818–23. First literary publication, 1825. To London at father’s death. Assisted in compilation of “Newgate Calendar.” Tour through England; through France, Germany, Russia and the East, as agent for British and Foreign Bible Society, 1833–39. Contrib. letters on his travels to “Morning Post,” 1837–39. Married Mary Clarke, 1840. Tour in S. E. Europe, 1844. Bought estate on Oulton Broad. Lived there till about 1865. Removed to Brompton. Wife died there, 1869. Died, at Oulton, 26 July, 1881. Works: “Romantic Ballads” (from the Danish), 1826; “Targum,” 1835; “The Bible in Spain” (3 vols.), 1843; “The Zincali” (2 vols.), 1841; “Lavengro,” 1851; “The Romany Rye,” 1857; “Wild Wales,” 1862; “Romano Lavo-Lil,” 1874. He translated: F. M. von Klinger’s “Faustus,” 1825; Pushkin’s “The Talisman,” 1835; St. Luke’s Gospel into Gitano dialect, “Embéo e Majoró Lucas,” 1837; “Crixote e Majoró Lucas,” 1872; Ellis Wynn’s “Sleeping Bard” from the Cambrian-British, 1860; Nasr Al-Dín’s “Turkish Jester” (posthumous), 1884; Ewald’s “Death of Balder” (posthumous), 1889. He edited: “Evangelisa San Lucusan Guissan” (Basque translation of St. Luke’s Gospel), 1838.

Personal

  Since I last wrote to you, I have received a visit from a remarkable person, with whom I should like to make you acquainted…. His mind is full, even to overflowing, of intelligence and original thought. It is ——, the distinguished linguist, of whom I shall speak: besides his calling upon me, I also passed an evening in his society, and he talked to me the whole time. I do not know when I have heard such a flow of varying conversation—odd—original—brilliant—animating;—any and every one of these epithets might be applied to it; it is like having a flood of mind poured out upon you, and that, too, evidently from the strong necessity of setting the current free, not from any design to shine or overpower. I think I was most interested in his descriptions of Spain, a country where he has lived much, and to which he is strongly attached…. All I had to complain of was, that, being used to a sort of steam-boat rapidity, both in bodily and mental movements, ——, while gallantly handing me from one room to another, rushed into a sort of gallopade which nearly took my breath away. On mentioning this afterwards to a gentleman who had been of the party, he said, “What could you expect from a man who has been handing armed Croats instead of ladies, from one tent to another?” for I believe it is not very long since my ubiquitous friend visited Hungary.

  Catherine Gurney gave us a note to George Borrow, so on him we called,—a tall, ungainly, uncouth man, with great physical strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation. He was sitting on one side of the fire, and his old mother on the other, his spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day was very rainy, but he was courteous and not displeased to be a little lionized for his delicacy is not of the most susceptible.

  Borrow came in the evening: now a fine man, but a most disagreeable one; a kind of character that would be most dangerous in rebellious times—one that would suffer or persecute to the utmost. His face is expressive of wrong-headed determination.

  It is easy to understand how one who so valued words as symbols of thought as to spend his life in interpreting them from so many tongues, should become a perfect master of his own language: not only was Borrow such a master, but he made bold and unsparing use of his power, and by its means put on record the actions of a life unique in its sustained individuality from “the flash and triumph and glorious sweat” of his first ride, till the cloud, which overhangs all, approached him. Humour, which is given us to neutralise the worst forebodings, he largely possessed; and his, while it resembled Sterne’s more than any other man’s, was peculiarly his own, but mingled with a sounder sentiment of pathos than is to be found in Yorick.

  He must have been, I should say, full six feet four inches in height—a very well-built man, with somewhat of a military carriage; snow-white hair; dark, strongly marked eyebrows; his countenance pleasing, betokening calm firmness, self-confidence, and a mind under control, though capable of passion. His frame was without heaviness, but evidently very powerful. His hands were small for his size, beautifully formed, and very white. He was very vain of his hands, which he used to say he derived from his mother, who was of Huguenot extraction. He was, when in the vein, a delightful talker. It will give some idea of the effect of his appearance, if I recount a circumstance which occurred on his first visit at the Vicarage. My eldest son, then between ten and eleven years of age, having been introduced, stood with eyes fixed on him for some moments, and then without speaking left the apartment. He passed into the room where his mother was engaged with some ladies, and cried out, “Well, mother, that is a man.” He could find no other words to express his admiration. The child’s enthusiasm evidently delighted Borrow, who, from all I saw of him, I should judge to have been singularly alive to, and grateful for, tokens of affection. We soon came to delight in his society. He often dropped in of an evening, when he would, after tea, sit in the centre of a group before the fire with his hands on his knees—his favourite position—pouring forth tales of the scenes he had witnessed in his wanderings—sometimes among the gypsies of Spain, sometimes among those of England. Then he would suddenly spring from his seat and walk to and fro the room in silence; anon he would clap his hands and sing a Gypsy song, or perchance would chant forth a translation of some Viking poem; after which he would sit down again and chat about his father, whose memory he revered as he did his mother’s; and finally he would recount some tale of suffering or sorrow with deep pathos—his voice being capable of expressing triumphant joy or the profoundest sadness.

  From early youth he had a passion, and an extraordinary capacity for languages, and on reaching manhood he was appointed agent to the Bible Society, and was sent to Russia to translate and introduce the Scriptures. While there he mastered the language, and learnt besides the Sclavonian and the Gypsie dialects. He translated the Testament into the Tartar Mantchow, and published versions from English into thirty languages. He made successive visits into Russia, Norway, Turkey, Bohemia, Spain and Barbary. In fact, the sole of his foot never rested. While an agent for the Bible Society in Spain, he translated the Testament into Spanish, Portuguese, Romany, and Basque—which language, it is said, the Devil himself never could learn—and when he had learnt the Basque he acquired the name of Lavengro, or word-master…. He had a splendid physique, standing six feet two in his stockings, and he had brains as well as muscles, as his works sufficiently show.

  He was a tall, large, fine-looking man who must have been handsome in his youth. I knew at the time in London a Mr. Kerrison, who had been as a very young man, probably in the twenties, very intimate with Borrow. He told me that one night Borrow acted very wildly, whooping and vociferating so as to cause the police to follow him, and after a long run led them to the edge of the Thames, “and there they thought they had him.” But he plunged boldly into the water and swam in his clothes to the opposite shore, and so escaped.

  The remarkable characteristic of Borrow through all his varied career was that he could mix with all sorts of company and yet hold him aloof from the vicious and depraved. He could touch pitch and not be defiled—walk through the fire and not be burned. Woe to the weak and half-hearted who shall try to pass through such ordeals as George Borrow endured! It is not everyone who can draw Ulysses’s bow.

  George Borrow who, if he were not a gypsy by blood ought to have been one, was, for some years, our near neighbor in Hereford Square. My friend was amused by his quaint stories and his (real or sham) enthusiasm for Wales, and cultivated his acquaintance. I never liked him, thinking him more or less of a hypocrite. His missions, recorded in the “Bible in Spain,” and his translations of the scriptures into the out-of the-way tongues, for which he had a gift, were by no means consonant with his real opinions concerning the veracity of the said Bible.

  Often used to dine in Albemarle Street in times well within my memory. Tall, broad, muscular, with very heavy shoulders, and perfectly white hair—my father used to tell us that Borrow’s hair was grey before he was thirty—his was a figure which no one who has seen it is likely to forget. I never remember to have seen him dressed in anything but black broadcloth, and white cotton socks were generally distinctly visible above his low shoes. I think that with Borrow the desire to attract attention to himself, to inspire a feeling of awe and mystery, must have been a ruling passion. No one will ever unravel the true from the fictitious in his charming writings; it is possible that the incidents and characters connected with his extraordinary life and adventures had become so intermingled in his own mind, that he himself could hardly have unraveled them.

  In his last years Borrow was very infirm, and the few visitors who saw him—for he was far from courting visits—have given almost distressing accounts of his entourage; for after his wife’s death he seems to have lacked many home comforts, and to have grown more melancholy than ever, though to the last he was kind and considerate to his poorer neighbours, some of whom still live to cherish his memory. He seems to have lost all savour of life, and when he could no longer stride over heath and dene, nor rejoice in the free life of the “children of the open air,” when he became house-bound and caged, his spirits ebbed, his heart sank within him, and on July 26th, 1881, he died at Oulton, just three weeks after completing his 78th year.

  Borrow was a man of something like genius, who went his own way in life, wherever it led him, who, like one of Browning’s heroes, was ever a fighter, and who yet passed away in peaceful obscurity, almost forgotten by the public, which he had once puzzled and perturbed.

The Bible in Spain, 1843

  I read Borrow with great delight all the way down per rail, and it shortened the rapid flight of that velocipede. You may depend upon it that the book will sell, which, after all, is the rub. It is the antipodes of Lord Carnarvon, and yet how they tally in what they have in common, and that is much—the people, the scenery of Galicia, and the suspicions and absurdities of Spanish Jack-in-Office, who yielded not in ignorance or in insolence to any kind of redtapists, hatched in the hot-beds of jobbery and utilitarian mares’-nests…. Borrow spares none of them. I see he hits right and left and floors his man wherever he meets him. I am pleased with his honest sincerity of purpose and his graphic abrupt style. It is like an old Spanish ballad, leaping in res medias, going from incident to incident, bang, bang, bang, hops, steps, and jumps like a cracker, and leaving off like one, when you wish he would give you another touch or coup de grâce…. He really sometimes puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, á la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody’s friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one…. He is as full of meat as an egg, and a fresh laid one—not one of your Inglis breed, long addled by over-bookmaking. Borrow will lay you golden eggs, and hatch them after the ways of Egypt; put salt on his tail and secure him in your coop, and beware how any poacher coaxes him with “raisins” or reasons out of the Albemarle preserves.

  Its literary merits were considerable—but balanced by equal demerits. Nothing more vivid and picturesque than many of its descriptions of scenery and sketches of adventure: nothing more weak and confused than every attempt either at a chain of reasoning, or even a consecutive narrative of events that it included. It was evidently the work of a man of uncommon and highly interesting character and endowments; but as clearly he was quite raw as an original author. The glimpses of a most curious and novel subject that he opened were, however, so very striking, that, on the whole, that book deserved well to make a powerful impression, and could not but excite great hopes that his more practised pen would hereafter produce many things of higher consequence. The present volumes will, we apprehend, go far to justify such anticipations. In point of composition, generally, Mr. Borrow has made a signal advance; but the grand point is, that he seems to have considered and studied himself in the interval; wisely resolved on steadily avoiding in future the species of efforts in which he had been felt to fail; and on sedulously cultivating and improving the peculiar talents which were as universally acknowledged to be brilliantly displayed in numerous detached passages of his “Gipsies.”

  Having real merit and universal interest, being wholly popular in its style, and yet exceedingly curious in its information, crowded with anecdote and adventure, dialogue and incident, throwing a flood of light over Spain from a wholly new point of view, carrying us into the huts of the miserable peasants, giving us the gipsey-talk by the way-side, laying open the inner heart of the land, leading into the reality or prospect of danger every step of the way—although thousands and tens of thousands have been sold already; it has not yet taken its true place in general esteem. We have passed over the peninsula with many travellers, sometimes with great pleasure; but never so agreeably or profitably before: never with one who made us so familiar with national character, or gave us such a home-bred feeling for the people at large. Others have described the cities and works of art of this famous old land; many others have acquainted us sufficiently with the life of a single class in the cities—still, a large field remained unoccupied which Mr. Borrow has tilled with great patience and success. No one has ever trodden that ill-fated soil under more manifest advantages. To say nothing of his unwearied perseverance, his heroic daring, his calmness in peril, his presence of mind in disaster, and his love of adventure—several languages, the keys to the people’s heart, were at his command.

  If any of our readers should happen not yet to have read “The Bible in Spain,” we advise them to read it forthwith. Though irregular, without plan or order, it is a thoroughly racy, graphic, and vigorous book, full of interest, honest, and straightforward, and without any cant or affectation in it; indeed the man’s prominent quality is honesty, otherwise we should never have seen anything in that strong love of pugilism, horsemanship, Gypsy life and physical daring of all kinds, of which his books are full. He is a Bible Harry Lorrequer,—a missionary Bamfylde Moore Carew,—an Exeter Hall bruiser,—a polyglot wandering Gypsy. Fancy these incongruities,—and yet George Borrow is the man who embodies them in his one extraordinary person!

  Few books possess more vivid interest.

  It is, I believe, the opinion of the best critics that “The Bible in Spain” is Borrow’s masterpiece.

  Perhaps the most ill-advised title that a well-written book ever labored under, giving as it does the idea that the book is a prolonged tract…. Good reading as the book is, and ardent as its author appears to be in the cause he has espoused, there is an undeniable ring of falsity through the book. The whole enterprise was manifestly undertaken by Borrow purely in the spirit of adventure and to make a living for himself; while it was demanded of the Bible Society’s agent that, in his reports, zeal for the Protestant faith alone should seem to have been his aim when he began the work. So, like everything written to order, “The Bible in Spain” fails in spontaneity. The adventures, indeed, are written with gusto, and there are enough of them to carry off the woeful cant which fills in between scene and scene; and throughout Borrow was persuaded by the idea that he was writing for the Bible Society, and was ever artist in direr strait? There is something exquisitely ridiculous in the whole situation—the plight of Borrow, the plight of the Bible Society—it is hard to say which of the two must have been more bewildered. The story goes that “there always was a large attendance in the Society’s room” on the days when Borrow’s letters were to be read, and one can believe it. But the story does not relate that, in Spain, Borrow sat puzzling over how to dish up his adventures with the proper seasoning of zeal, and, I dare say, wrote many a line “with his tongue in his cheek,” as the vulgar saying goes. Now, this may be doing Borrow an injustice, but it is certainly the impression one gets in reading “The Bible in Spain,” and to read between the lines is often the best way of getting the truth out of a book. Nothing could undo Borrow’s hatred of Popery…. “The Bible in Spain” remains to this day far the most popular of Borrow’s books.

Lavengro, 1851

  He has written a book called “Lavengro,” in which he proposes to satisfy the public curiosity about himself, and to illustrate his biography as “Scholar, Gypsy, and Priest.” The book, however, is not all fact; it is fact mixed liberally with fiction,—a kind of poetic rhapsody; and yet it contains many graphic pictures of real life,—life little known of, such as exists to this day among the by-lanes and on the moors of England. One thing is obvious, the book is thoroughly original, like all Mr. Borrow has written. It smells of the green lanes and breezy downs,—of the field and the tent; and his characters bear the tan of the sun and the marks of the weather upon their faces. The book is not written as a practised book-maker would write it; it is not pruned down to suit current tastes. Borrow throws into it whatever he has picked up on the high-ways and by-ways, garnishing it up with his own imaginative spicery ad libitum, and there you have it,—“Lavengro; the Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest!” But the work is not yet completed, seeing that he has only as yet treated us to the two former parts of the character; “The Priest” is yet to come, and then we shall see how it happened that Exeter Hall was enabled to secure the services of this gifted missionary.

  Circumstantial as Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to the end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate; you feel that like Ben Jonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithful and exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the less pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is Lavengro’s and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled.

  The most delightful of all his books.

General

  Have you seen or heard anything of a strange man named Borrow, who has written a book called the “Gypsies in Spain,” and the “Bible in Spain?” They are most interesting books, and he is a most strange man. He had a wonderful facility in gaining the confidences of the lower classes, especially the gypsies. He gives all his adventures with wonderful openness, and some of the oddest stories come out. Some of his statements about the priests have given great offence to the Dublin Review people, and they have made a fierce attack on poor Mr. Borrow, but he is a bold man, and can stand his own ground.

  The “Gypsies of Spain,” Mr. Borrow’s former work, was a Spanish olla—a hotch-potch of the jockey tramper, philologist, and missionary. It was a thing of shreds and patches—a true book of Spain; the chapters, like her bundle of unamalgamating provinces, were just held together, and no more, by the common tie of religion, yet it was strange, and richly flavoured with genuine borracha. It was the first work of a diffident unexperienced man, who, mistrusting his own powers, hoped to conciliate critics by leaning on Spanish historians and gypsie poets. These corks, if such a term can be applied to the ponderous levities by which he was swamped, are now cast aside; he dashes boldly into the tide, and swims gallantly over the breakers. The Gypsies were, properly speaking, his pilot balloon. The Bible and its distribution have been the business of his existence; wherever moral darkness brooded, there, the Bible in his hand, he forced his way…. Mr. Borrow, although no tourist “in search of the picturesque,” has a true perception of nature. His out-of-door existence has brought him in close contact with her, in all her changes, in all her fits of sunshine, or of storm; and well can he portray her, whatever be the expression. Always bearing in mind the solemn object of his mission, he colours like Rembrandt, and draws like Spagnoletto, rather than with the voluptuous sunniness of Claude Lorraine and Albano. His chief study is man; and therefore, as among the classics, landscape becomes an accessory.

  In George Borrow’s works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity (so to speak), which give them a stamp of their own. After reading his “Bible in Spain” I felt as if I had actually traveled at his side, and seen the “wild Sil” rush from its mountain cradle; wandered in the hilly wilderness of the Sierras; encountered and conversed with Manehegan, Castillian, Andalusian, Arragonese, and, above all, with the savage Gitanos.

  This Borrow is a remarkable man. As agent for the British and Foreign Bible Society he has undertaken journeys into remote lands, and, acquainted from his early youth not only with many European languages, but likewise with the Romany of the English gipsies, he sought out with zest the gipsies everywhere, and became their faithful missionary. He has made himself so thoroughly master of their ways and customs that he soon passed for “one of their blood.” He slept in their tents in the forests of Russia and Hungary, visited them in their robber caves in the mountainous pass-regions of Italy, lived with them five entire years in Spain, where he, for his endeavours to distribute the Gospel in that Catholic country, was imprisoned with the very worst of them for a time in the dungeons of Madrid. He at last went over to North Africa, and sought after his Tartars even there. It is true no one has taken equal pains with Borrow to introduce himself amongst this rude and barbarous people, but on that account he has been enabled better than any other to depict their many mysteries, and the frequent impressions which his book has passed through within a short period show with what interest the English public have received his graphic descriptions.

  Though we do not doubt that Mr. Borrow is a good counsel in his own cause, we are yet strongly of opinion that Time in his case has some wrongs to repair, and that “Lavengro” has not obtained the fame which was its due. It contains passages which in their way are not surpassed by anything in English literature. The truth and vividness of the description both of scenes and persons, coupled with the purity, force, and simplicity of the language, should confer immortality upon many of its pages…. To this we must add that various portions of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow’s career, while we ourselves can testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, that nothing can excel the fidelity with which he has described both men and things. Far from his showing any tendency to exaggeration, such of his characters as we chance to have known, and they are not a few, are rather within the truth than beyond it. However picturesquely they may be drawn, the lines are invariably those of nature. Why under these circumstances he should envelop the question in mystery is more than we can divine. There can be no doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole, of the work is a narrative of actual occurrences, and just as little [doubt] that it would gain immensely by a plain avowal of the fact.

  No man’s writing can take you into the country as Borrow’s can: it makes you feel the sunshine, see the meadows, smell the flowers, hear the skylark sing and the grasshopper chirrup.—Who else can do it? I know of none.

  There is this difficulty in writing about him, that the audience must necessarily consist of fervent devotees on the one hand, and of complete infidels, or at least complete know-nothings, on the other. To any one who, having the faculty to understand either, has read “Lavengro” or “The Bible in Spain,” or even “Wild Wales,” praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel case…. Strong and vivid as Borrow’s drawing of places and persons is, he always contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the air of being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself in “Lavengro,” is sufficient to identify them to the most careless reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in “Wild Wales,” though less poetical is equally vivid. Yet here it would be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual spot.

  It was by his publication of the “Gipsies in Spain,” but more especially by the “Bible in Spain,” that Borrow won a high place in literature. The romantic interest of these two works drew the public towards the man as much as towards the writer, and he was the wonder of a few years. But in the writings which followed he went too far. “Lavengro,” which followed his first successes in 1850, and which, besides being a personal narrative, was a protest against the “kidglove” literature introduced by Bulwer and Disraeli, made him many enemies and lost him not a few friends. The book, which has been called an “epic of ale,” glorified boxing, spoke up for an open-air life, and assailed the “gentility nonsense of the time.” Such things were unpardonable, and Borrow, the hero of a season before, was tabooed as the high-priest of vulgar tastes. In the sequel to the book which had caused so much disfavour he chastised those who had dared to ridicule him and his work. But it was of no avail. He was passing into another age, and the critics could now afford to ignore his onslaught. “Wild Wales,” published in 1862, though a desultory work, contained much of the old vigorous stuff which characterised previous writings, but it attracted small attention, and “Romano Lavo-Lil,” when it appeared in 1872, was known only to the specially interested and the curious. Still Borrow remained unchanged. His strong individuality asserted itself in his narrowed circle. His love for the roadside, the heath, the gipsies’ dingle, was as true as in other days. He was the same lover of strange books, the same passionate wanderer among strange people, the same champion of English manliness, and the same hater of genteel humbug and philistinism. Few men have put forth so many high qualities and maintained them untarnished throughout so long a career as did this striking figure of the nineteenth century.

  For invalids and delicate persons leading retired lives, there are no books like Borrow’s. Lassitude and Languor, horrid hags, simply pick up their trailing skirts and scuttle out of any room into which he enters. They cannot abide him. A single chapter of Borrow is air and exercise; and, indeed, the exercise is not always gentle.

  Lovers of George Borrow are wont to claim that he is one of the choicest of bedside comrades. Mr. Birrell, indeed, stoutly maintains that slumber, healthy and calm, follows the reading of his books just as it follows a brisk walk or rattling drive. “A single chapter of Borrow is air and exercise.” Neither need we be wide awake when we skim over his pages. We can read with half-closed eyes, and we feel his stir and animation pleasantly from without, just as we feel the motion of a carriage when we are heavy with sleep.

  “Lavengro” is like nothing else in either biography or fiction—and it is both fictitious and biographical. It is the gradual revelation of a strange, unique being. But the revelation does not proceed in an orderly and chronological fashion; it is not begun in the first chapter, and still less is it completed in the last. After a careful perusal of the book, you will admit that though it has fascinated and impressed you, you have quite failed to understand it…. “Romany Rye” is the continuation of “Lavengro,” but scarcely repeats its charm; its most remarkable feature is an “Appendix,” in which Borrow expounds his views upon things in general, including critics and politics. It is a marvellous trenchant piece of writing, and from the literary point of view delightful; but it must have hurt a good many people’s feelings at the time it was published, and even now shows the author on his harsh side only. We may agree with all he says, and yet wish he had uttered it in a less rasping tone…. Writing with him was spontaneous, but never heedless or unconsidered; it was always the outcome of deep thought and vehement feeling. Other writers and their books may be twain, but Borrow and his books are one. Perhaps they might be improved in art, or arrangement, or subject; but we should no longer care for them then, because they would cease to be Borrow. Borrow may not have been a beauty or a saint; but a man he was; and good or bad, we would not alter a hair of him.

  Capricious as was Borrow’s social satire, there was in it salutary truth. The public needed to be addressed with a frankness that Thackeray was unwilling to venture upon, before it could free itself from the slough of sentiment and sham…. Borrow carried his readers back over the romantic revivals to the adventures of Defoe. But hanging over his books is a dreamy, poetic glamour wanting in the old picaresque novel.

  It is sometimes needful to declare the beginning from the end. George Borrow died on July 26, 1881. His literary activity covered a period of over fifty years, from 1823 to 1874. The Bibliography of his printed works is given in thirty-four numbers. The “Zincali,” the account of the Gypsies of Spain, has had eight English editions and three American reprints, besides a garbled Italian Version; the “Bible in Spain,” no less than twenty-seven editions and reprints and translations into German, French, and Russian; “Lavengro,” the “Romany Rye,” and “Wild Wales,” too, have been widely read. Such an extended literary career would alone justify a formal biography, but it is the smallest part of the justification, for no literary figure of the nineteenth century has stood for a more interesting personality than the author of the “Bible in Spain.”

  No truer books were ever penned than “The Bible in Spain” and “Lavengro”—“Romany Rye.” There is no mystery about them, if you have the key. And what is the key?—only Sympathy! Believe them and read and weep and feel. Believe them and then investigate. Investigate the times in which Borrow lived and wandered and struggled and wrought, as the First Volume of this work will show. Not in the public documents of civil history, but in out-of-the-way pamphlets, obscure handbooks, local almanacs, rural newspapers, and old magazines—all long ago obsolete and now despised, found on the twopenny shelf of country book-stalls on market days. That is where I met “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye” and rejoiced to find them true. There I found the author of them to be no banshee, no brownie, no mystery at all. The brétima—the haze of Galicia—the forerunner of corpse-candles, witches, and all the “fairy family” of Celtic mythology—fades into thin air under the microscope of honest inspection, and untiring search in letters, records, newspapers, poll-books, army lists, and all the forgotten dust-heaps of shop and attic. Of course men easily ignore the details of family gossip current only with the mothers and grandmothers of the century.

  In “Lavengro” he speaks of the choughs continually circling about the spire of Norwich cathedral, when, no doubt, he is referring to the jackdaws: he calls the planet Jupiter a star; and he writes a book descriptive of wide journeyings in Spain without telling us anything worth knowing of the wild life of that country. Humanity always interested him, more than birds and flowers; during his travels in “Wild Wales” he was always on the look-out for roadside inns, and desirous of hobnobbing with their rustic frequenters. The gipsies’ horse-dealing transactions, and the philological puzzles of their ancient language, occupied his mind and pen for hours together; but he leaves it to a Romany chal to describe the charm of the gipsies’ open-air and roving life, contenting himself with setting down the rover’s words without comment. True, he would seem to imply that the sun, moon, and stars, and the wind on the heath were as much to him as to Jasper Petulengro; but when he stood on a Welsh mountain-top, where, one would think, the wide outlook would have inspired him, he only sees a fitting opportunity for pompous declamation.