CHAPTER I--THE SCHOLAR SAYS GOOD-BYE TO THE GYPSY, AND PITCHES HIS TENT

Transcribed from the 1901 Hodder and Stoughton edition by David Price,

email ccx074@pglaf.org

ISOPEL BERNERS

BY

GEORGE BORROW

_The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825: An

Episode in the Autobiography of George Borrow_.

THE TEXT EDITED WITH

INTRODUCTION & NOTES BY

THOMAS SECCOMBE

AUTHOR OF "THE AGE OF JOHNSON"

ASSISTANT EDITOR OF THE DICTIONARY

OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY

LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON

27 PATERNOSTER ROW

1901

_Printed by Hazell_, _Watson & Viney_, _Ld_., _London and Aylesbury_.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

The last century was yet in its infancy when the author of _The Romany

Rye_ first saw the light in the sleepy little East Anglian township of

East Dereham, in the county distinguished by Borrow as the one in which

the people eat the best dumplings in the world and speak the purest

English. "Pretty quiet D[ereham]" was the retreat in those days of a

Lady Bountiful in the person of Dame Eleanor Fenn, relict of the worthy

editor of the _Paston Letters_. It is better known in literary history

as the last resting-place of a sad and unquiet spirit, escaped from a

world in which it had known nought but sorrow, of "England's sweetest and

most pious bard," William Cowper. But Destiny was weaving a robuster

thread to connect East Dereham with literature, for George Borrow {1} was

born there on July 5th, 1803, and, nomad though he was, the place was

always dear to his heart as his earliest home.

In 1816, after ramblings far and wide both in Ireland and in Scotland,

the Borrows settled in Norwich, where George was schooled under a master

whose name at least is still familiar to English youth, Dr. Valpy

(brother of Dr. Richard Valpy). Among his schoolfellows at the grammar

school were Rajah Brooke and Dr. James Martineau. George Borrow, a

hardened truant from his earliest teens, was once horsed, to undergo a

flogging, on the back of James Martineau, and he never afterwards took

kindly to the philosophy of that remarkable man. We are glad to know

that Edward Valpy's ferule was weak, though his scholarship was strong.

Stories were current that even in those days George used to haunt the

gipsy tents on that Mousehold Heath which lives eternally in the breezy

canvases of "Old Crome," and that he went so far as to stain his face

with walnut-juice to the right Egyptian hue. "Are you suffering from

jaundice, Borrow," asked the Doctor, "or is it merely dirt?" While at

Norwich, too, he was greatly influenced in the direction of linguistics

by the English "pocket Goethe," William Taylor, the head of a clan known

as the Taylors of Norwich, to distinguish them from a race in which the

principle of heredity was even more strikingly developed--the Taylors of

Ongar. In February 1824 his father, the gallant Captain Thomas Borrow,

died, and his articles in the firm of a Norwich solicitor having

determined, George went to London to commence literary man, in the old

sense of the servitude, under the well-known bookseller-publisher, Sir

Richard Phillipps. In Grub Street he translated and compiled galore, but

when the trees began to shoot in 1825 he broke his chain and escaped to

the country, to the dingle, and to Isopel Berners.

To dwell upon the bare outlines of Borrow's early career would be a

superfluously dull proceeding. We shall only add a few names and dates

to the framework, supplied with a fidelity that is rare in much more

formal works of autobiography, in the pages of _Lavengro_. From the same

pages we may detach just a few of the earlier influences which went to

make up the rare and complex individuality of the writer. Borrow's

father, a fine old soldier, in revealing his son's youthful idiosyncrasy,

projects a clear mental image of his own habit of mind. "The boy had the

impertinence to say the classics were much over-valued, and amongst other

things that some horrid fellow or other, some Welshman, I think (thank

God it was not an Irishman), was a better poet than Ovid. {2} That a boy

of his years should entertain an opinion of his own, I mean one which

militates against all established authority, is astonishing. As well

might a raw recruit pretend to offer an unfavourable opinion on the

manual and platoon exercise. The idea is preposterous; the lad is too

independent by half."

Borrow's account of his father's death is a highly affecting piece of

English. The ironical humour blent with pathos in his picture of this

ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart with

a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of "My Uncle

Toby"), the details of the ailments and the portents that attended his

infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the wandering military

life from barrack to barrack and from garrison to garrison, inevitably

remind the reader of the childish reminiscences of Laurence Sterne, a

writer to whom it may thus early be said that George Borrow paid no small

amount of unconscious homage. A homage of another sort, fully recognised

and declared, was that paid to the great work of Defoe, and to the spirit

of strange and romantic enterprise which it aroused in its reader.

After _Robinson Crusoe_ there played across the disk of his youthful

memory a number of weird and hairy figures never to be effaced. A

strange old herbalist and snake-killer with a skin cap first whetted his

appetite for the captivating confidences of roadside vagrants, and the

acquaintanceship serves as an introduction to the scene of the gipsy

encampment, where the young Sapengro or serpent charmer was first claimed

as brother by Jasper Petulengro. The picture of the encampment may serve

as an example of Borrovian prose, nervous, unembarrassed, and graphic.

One day it happened, being on my rambles, I entered a green lane which

I had never seen before. At first it was rather narrow, but as I

advanced it became considerably wider. In the middle was a drift-way

with deep ruts, but right and left was a space carpeted with a sward

of trefoil and clover. There was no lack of trees, chiefly ancient

oaks, which, flinging out their arms from either side, nearly formed a

canopy and afforded a pleasing shelter from the rays of the sun, which

was burning fiercely above. Suddenly a group of objects attracted my

attention. Beneath one of the largest of the trees, upon the grass,

was a kind of low tent or booth, from the top of which a thin smoke

was curling. Beside it stood a couple of light carts, whilst two or

three lean horses or ponies were cropping the herbage which was

growing nigh. . . .

As a pendant to the landscape take a Flemish interior. The home of the

Borrows had been removed in the meantime, in accordance with the roving

traditions of the family, from Norman Cross to Edinburgh and from

Edinburgh to Clonmel.

And to the school I went [at Clonmel], where I read the Latin tongue

and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman who sat behind a black

oaken desk with a huge Elzevir Flaccus before him, in a long gloomy

kind of hall with a broken stone floor, the roof festooned with

cobwebs, the walls considerably dilapidated and covered over with

stray figures in hieroglyphics evidently produced by the application

of a burnt stick.

In Ireland, too, he made the acquaintance of the gossoon Murtagh, who

taught him Irish in return for a pack of cards. In the course of his

wanderings with his father's regiment he develops into a well-grown and

well-favoured lad, a shrewd walker and a bold rider. "People may talk of

first love--it is a very agreeable event, I dare say--but give me the

flush, the triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride." {5}

At Norwich he learns modern languages from an old _emigre_, a true

disciple of the _ancien cour_, who sets Boileau high above Dante; and

some misty German metaphysics from the Norwich philosopher, who

consistently seeks a solace in smoke from the troubles of life. His

father had already noted his tendency to fly off at a tangent which was

strikingly exhibited in the lawyer's office, where "within the womb of a

lofty deal desk," when he should have been imbibing Blackstone and

transcribing legal documents, he was studying Monsieur Vidocq and

translating the Welsh bard Ab Gwilym; he was consigning his legal career

to an early grave when he wrote this elegy on the worthy attorney his

master.

He has long since sunk to his place in a respectable vault, in the

aisle of a very respectable church, whilst an exceedingly respectable

marble slab against the neighbouring wall tells on a Sunday some eye

wandering from its prayer-book that his dust lies below. To secure

such respectabilities in death he passed a most respectable life, a

more respectable-looking individual never was seen.

In the meantime as a sequel to his questionings on the subjects of

reality and truth, the Author was asking himself "What is death?" and the

query serves as a prelude to the first of the many breezy dialogues with

that gipsy cousin-german to Autolycus, Jasper Petulengro.

"What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?"

"My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old

song of Pharaoh . . . when a man dies he is cast into the earth and

his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child,

then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the

world, why, then he is cast into the earth and there is an end of the

matter."

"And do you think that is the end of man?"

"There's an end of him, brother, more's the pity."

"Why do you say so?"

"Life is sweet, brother."

"Do you think so?"

"Think so! there's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun,

moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on

the heath. Life is very sweet, brother: who would wish to die?"

"I would wish to die."

"You talk like a gorgio--which is the same as talking like a fool;

were you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed! a

Romany chal would wish to live for ever."

"In sickness, Jasper?"

"There's the sun and stars, brother."

"In blindness, Jasper?"

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that I

would gladly live for ever. Daeta, we'll now go to the tents and put

on the gloves, and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is

to be alive, brother."

Leaving Norwich and his legal trammels, a few weeks after his father's

death, in 1824, Lavengro reaches London--the scene of Grub Street

struggles not greatly relaxed in severity since the days of Newbery,

Gardener and Christopher Smart. As the genius of Hawthorne was cooped up

and enslaved for the American "Peter Parley," so that of Borrow was hag-

ridden by a bookseller publisher of an even worse type, the radical

alderman and philanthropic sweater, Sir Richard Phillipps. For this

stony-hearted faddist he covered reams of paper with printers' copy; and

we are told that the kind of compilation that he liked (and probably

executed) best was that of _Newgate Lives and Trials_. He had well-nigh

reached the end of his tether when he had the conversation with

Phillipps's head factotum, Taggart, which we cite below and recommend

feelingly to the consideration of every literary aspirant. Sordid and

commonplace enough are the details; simple and free from every kind of

inflation the language in which they are narrated. Yet how picturesque

are these vignettes of London life! How vivid and yet how strange are

the figures that animate them! The harsh literary impresario with his

"drug in the market," who seems to have stalked straight out of Smollett,

{8} the gnarled old applewoman, with every wrinkle shown, on her stall

upon London Bridge, the grasping Armenian merchant who softened at the

sound of his native tongue, the giddy young spendthrift Francis Ardry and

the confiding young creature who had permitted him to hire her a very

handsome floor in the West End, the gipsies and thimble-riggers in

Greenwich Park--what moving and lifelike figures are these, stippled in

with a seeming absence of art, yet as strange and as rare as a Night in

Bagdad, a chapter of Balzac, or the most fantastic scene in the _New

Arabian Nights_.

This brief recapitulation--in which it has been possible but just to

touch upon a few of the inner springs of Borrow's life as revealed in the

autobiographical _Lavengro_--brings us once again to that spring day in

1825--May 20th--when the author disposed of an unidentifiable manuscript

for the sumptuous equivalent of 20 pounds. On May 22nd, after little

more than a year's residence in London, he abandons the city. From

London he proceeds to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, which he reaches on May

23rd; visits Stonehenge, the Roman Camp of Old Sarum and Salisbury; on

May 26th he leaves Salisbury, and (after an encounter with the long-lost

son of the old applewoman, returned from Botany Bay), strikes north-west.

On the 30th he has been walking four days in a northerly direction, when

he arrives at the inn where the maid Jenny refreshes him at the pump, and

he meets the author with whom he passes the night. On the 31st he

purchases the horse and cart of Jack Slingsby, whom he had previously

seen but once, at Tamworth, many years ago when he was little more than a

child. On June 1st he makes the first practical experience of a

vagrant's life, and passes the night in the open air in a Shropshire

dell; on June 5th he is visited by Leonora Herne, the grandchild of the

old "brimstone hag" who was jealous of the cordiality with which the

young stranger had been received by the Petulengroes and initiated in the

secrets of their gipsy tribe. Three days later, betrayed to the old

woman by Leonora, he is drabbed (_i.e_. poisoned) with the manricli or

doctored cake of Mrs. Herne; his life is in imminent danger, but he is

saved by the opportune arrival of Peter Williams. He passes Sunday, June

12th, with the Welsh preacher and his wife Winifred; on the 21st he

departs with his itinerant hosts to the Welsh border. Before entering

Wales, however, he turns back with Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and

settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot

of the dingle hard by Mumper's Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire;

here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between

the philologer and the flaming tinman--all this, is it not related in

_Lavengro_, and substantiated with much hard labour of facts and dates by

Dr. W. I. Knapp in his exhaustive biography of George Borrow? The

allurement of his genius is such that the etymologist shall leave his

roots and the philologer his Maeso-Gothic to take to the highway and

dwell in the dingle with "Don Jorge."

Lavengro's triumph over the flaming tinman is the prelude to what

Professor Saintsbury justly calls "the miraculous episode of Ysopel

Berners," and the narrative of the author's life is thence continued,

with many digressions, but with a remarkable fidelity to fact as far as

the main issue is concerned, until the narrative, though not the life-

story of the author, abruptly terminates at Horncastle, in August 1825.

There follows what is spoken of as the veiled period of Borrow's life,

from 1826 to 1833.

The years in which we drift are generally veiled from posterity. The

system of psychometry carried to such perfection by Obermann and Amiel

could at no time have been exactly congenial to Borrow, who spoke of

himself at this period as "digging holes in the sand and filling them up

again." Roughly speaking, the years appear to have been spent

comparatively uneventfully, for the most part in Norfolk. In December

1832 he walked to London to interview the British and Foreign Bible

Society, covering a hundred and twelve miles in twenty-seven hours on

less than sixpennyworth of food and drink. He was thirty years old at

the time, and the achievement was the pride of his remaining years. Six

months later, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, he managed

to get on the paid staff of the Society, to the bewilderment of Norwich

"friends," who were inclined to be ironical on the subject of the

transformation of the chum of hanged Thurtell and the disciple of godless

Billy Taylor into a Bible missionary. In July 1833, then, Borrow sets

out on his Eastern travels as the accredited agent of the Bible Society,

goes to St. Petersburg, "the finest city in the world," and obtains the

Russian imprimatur for a Manchu version of that suspicious novelty, the

Bible. He carried this scheme into execution to the general

satisfaction, and he returns to London in 1837; then to the south of

Europe, whence he reappears, larger than life and twice as natural, in

his masterly autobiographical romance of _The Bible in Spain_, the work

which made his name, which was sold by thousands, which was eagerly

acclaimed as an invaluable addition to "Sunday" literature, and pirated

in a generous spirit of emulation by American publishers.

We are now come to the circumstance of the composition of _Lavengro_.

_The Bible in Spain_, when it appeared in 1843, implied a wonderful

background to the Author's experience, a career diversified by all kinds

of wild adventures, "sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles," gipsies,

prisons,--what you will. {12}

The personal element in the book--so suggestive of mystery and

romance--excited the strongest curiosity. Apart from this, however, the

reading public of 1843 were not unnaturally startled by a book which

seemed to profess to be a good, serious, missionary work, but for which

it was manifest that _Gil Blas_ and not Bishop Heber had been taken as a

model. Not that any single comparison of the kind can convey the least

idea of the complex idiosyncrasy of such a work. There is a substratum

of _Guide Book_ and _Gil Blas_, no doubt, but there are unmistakable

streaks of Defoe, of Dumas, and of Dickens, with all his native

prejudices and insular predilections strong upon him. A narrative so

wide awake amidst a vagrant population of questionable morals and alien

race suggests an affinity with _Hajji Baba_ (a close kinsman, we

conceive, of the Borrovian picaro). But, above all, as one follows the

author through the mazes of his book, one is conscious of two strangely

assorted figures, never far from the itinerant's side, and always ready

to improve the occasion if a shadow of an opportunity be afforded. One,

who is prolific of philological chippings, might be compared to a

semblance of Max Muller; while the other, alternately denouncing the

wickedness and deriding the toothlessness of a grim Giant Pope, may be

likened, at a distance, to John Bunyan. About the whole--to conclude--is

an atmosphere, not too pronounced, of the _Newgate Calendar_, and a few

patches of sawdust from the Prize Ring. May not people well have

wondered (the good pious English folk to whom _Luck_ is a scandal, as the

Bible Society's secretary wrote to Borrow),--what manner of man is this,

this muleteer-missionary, this natural man with a pen in the hand of a

prize-fighter, but of a prize-fighter who is afflicted with the fads of a

philologer--and a pedant at that? The surprise may be compared to what

that of a previous generation would have been, had it seen Johnson and

Boswell and Baretti all fused into one man. The incongruity is

heightened by familiarity with Borrow's tall, blonde, Scandinavian

figure, and the reader is reminded of those roving Northmen of the days

of simple mediaeval devotion, who were wont to signalise their conversion

from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the

characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pilgrimage.

That Curiosity exaggerated and was a marvel-monger we shall attempt to

demonstrate. But, in the meantime, it was there, and it was very strong.

As for Borrow, he was prepared to derive stimulus from it just as long as

it maintained the unquestioning attitude of Jasper Petulengro when he

expressed the sentiments of gipsydom in the well-worn "Lor', brother, how

learned you are!"

In February 1843 Borrow wrote to Murray that he had begun his _Life_--a

"kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style,"--and was determined

that it should surpass anything that he had already written. It had been

contemplated, he added, for some months already, as a possible sequel to

the _Bible in Spain_ if that proved successful. Hitherto, he wrote, the

public had said "Good" (to his _Gypsies of Spain_, 1841), "Better" (to

the _Bible in Spain_), and he wanted it, when No. 3 appeared, to say

"Best." Five years rapidly passed away, until, in the summer of 1848,

the book was announced as about to appear shortly, under the title of

_Lavengro: An Autobiography_, which was soon changed to _Life: a Drama_.

The difficulty of writing a book which should have "no humbug in it,"

proved, as may well be supposed, immense, and would in any case be quite

sufficient to account for the long period of gestation. His perplexities

may have often been very near akin to those ascribed to the superstitious

author in the sixty-fifth chapter of _Lavengro_; his desire to be

original sadly cramping the powers of his mind, his fastidiousness being

so great that he invariably rejected whatever ideas he did not consider

to be legitimately his own. As a substitute for the usual padding of

humbug, sycophancy and second-hand ideas, he bethought himself of

philology, and he set himself to spring fragments of philological

instruction (often far from sound) upon his reader in the most unexpected

places, that his ingenuity could devise. He then began to base hopes

upon the book in proportion to its originality. At the last moment,

however, the Author grew querulous about his work, distrustful of the

reception that would be given to it, and even as to the advisability of

producing it at all. Much yet remained to be done, but for a long time

he refused, not only to forward new copy to Albemarle Street, but even to

revise the proofs of that which he had already written, and it required

all the dunning that Murray and the printer Woodfall dare apply before

_Lavengro_ with its altered sub-title (for at the last moment Borrow grew

afraid of openly avowing his identity with the speaking likeness which he

had created) could be announced as "just ready" in the _Athenaeum_ of

Dec. 14th, 1850.

_Lavengro; the Scholar_, _the Gypsy_, _the Priest_, eventually appeared

in three volumes on Feb. 7th, 1851. The autobiographical _Lavengro_

stopped short in July 1825, at the conclusion of the hundredth chapter,

with an abruptness worthy of the _Sentimental Journey_. The Author had

succeeded in extending the area of mystery, but not in satisfying the

public. Borrow's confidences were so very different in complexion from

those which the critics seemed to have expected, that they were taken

aback and declared to the public almost with one accord that the writer's

eccentricities had developed into mannerisms, that his theories of life

were political manifestoes, that his dialects were gibberish, and his

defiance of the orthodox canons of autobiography scarcely less than an

outrage upon the public taste.

From the general public came a fusillade of requests to solve the

prevailing mystery of the book. Was it fact or fiction?--or, if fact and

fiction were blended, in what proportions? Borrow ought to have been

prepared for a question so natural in the mouths of literary busy-bodies

at any time, and especially at a time when partisan spirit was rampant,

and the vitality of the lampoon as a factor in politics so far from

extinct. To show his contempt alike for the critical verdict and the

popular curiosity, after a quarrel, or at least a sharp coolness with

John Murray, he published in two volumes, in May 1857, _The Romany Rye_,

which carries on the story of _Lavengro_ for just about a month further,

namely, down towards the end of August 1825, and there again stops dead.

Whether we regard coherence or the rate of progress, no more attempt at

amendment is perceptible than can be discerned in the later as compared

with the earlier volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The peculiarities of the

earlier volume are, indeed, here accentuated, while the Author had

evidently only been confirmed by the lapse of years in the political

philosophy to which he had already given expression. At the end was

printed an appendix (a sort of _catalogue raisonne_ of Borrovian

prejudices), satirising with unmeasured bitterness the critics of

_Lavengro_.

The resumption of a story after an interval of over six years, with

appendages so extravagant, whether we regard their tenor or their length,

and with an indifference so sublime to the popular desire that he should

get along with his personal narrative, was hardly calculated to

conciliate critical opinion; but it had one capital effect. It drew from

Whitwell Elwin, himself a Norfolk man, and a literary critic of the

widest grasp and knowledge, this remarkable testimony: that far from

exaggerating such incidents as were drawn from his own experience (not a

few, as he himself could verify), Borrow's descriptions were rather

_within the truth than beyond it_. "However picturesquely they may be

drawn, the lines are invariably those of nature. . . . There can be no

doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole of the work, is a

narrative of actual occurrences."

Here, then, is the heart of the mystery, or of the mystery that is

apparent; the phenomenon is due primarily to the fact that Borrow's book

is so abnormally true as regards the matter, while in manner of

presentation it is so strikingly original. There are superficial traces,

no doubt, of not a few writers of the eighteenth century. In some of his

effects Borrow reproduces Sterne: essentially Sternean, for instance, is

the interview between the youthful author and the experienced Mr.

Taggart.

"Well, young gentleman," said Taggart to me one morning when we

chanced to be alone, a few days after the affair of cancelling, "how

do you like authorship?"

"I scarcely call authorship the drudgery I am engaged in," said I.

"What do you call authorship?" said Taggart.

"I scarcely know," said I; "that is, I can scarcely express what I

think it."

"Shall I help you out?" said Taggart, turning round his chair, and

looking at me.

"If you like," said I.

"To write something grand," said Taggart, taking snuff; "to be stared

at--lifted on people's shoulders."

"Well," said I, "that is something like it."

Taggart took snuff.

"Well," said he, "why don't you write something grand?"

"I have," said I.

"What?" said Taggart.

"Why," said I, "there are those ballads."

Taggart took snuff.

"And those wonderful versions from Ab Gwilym."

Taggart took snuff again.

"You seem to be very fond of snuff," said I, looking at him angrily.

Taggart tapped his box.

"Have you taken it long?"

"Three-and-twenty years."

"What snuff do you take?"

"Universal Mixture."

"And you find it of use?"

Taggart tapped his box.

"In what respect?" said I.

"In many--there is nothing like it to get a man through; but for snuff

I should scarcely be where I am now."

"Have you been long here?"

"Three-and-twenty years."

"Dear me," said I; "and snuff brought you through? Give me a

pinch--pah, I don't like it," and I sneezed.

"Take another pinch," said Taggart.

"No," said I; "I don't like snuff."

"Then you will never do for authorship; at least for this kind."

"So I begin to think. What shall I do?"

Taggart took snuff.

"You were talking of a great work. What shall it be?"

Taggart took snuff.

"Do you think I could write one?"

Taggart uplifted his two forefingers as if to tap; he did not,

however.

"It would require time," said I, with half a sigh.

Taggart tapped his box.

"A great deal of time. I really think that my ballads--"

Taggart took snuff.

"If published, would do me credit. I'll make an effort, and offer

them to some other publisher."

Taggart took a double quantity of snuff.

Equally Sterne-like is the conclusion to a chapter: "Italy--what was I

going to say about Italy?"

Less superficial is the influence of Cervantes and his successors of the

Picaresque school, down to the last and most representative of them in

England, namely Defoe and Smollett. Profoundest of all, perhaps, is the

influence of Defoe, of whose powers of intense realisation, exhibited in

the best parts of _Robinson Crusoe_, we get a fine counterpart amid the

outcasts in Mumper's Lane. Bound up with the truthfulness and

originality of the Author is that strange absence of sycophancy, which we

may flatter ourselves is no exceptional thing, but which is in reality a

very rare phenomenon in literature.

Apart from this independence of character which he so justly prized, and

a monomania or two, such as his devotion to philology or detestation of

popery, Borrow's mental peculiarities are not by any means so extravagant

as has been supposed. His tastes were for the most part not unusual,

though they might be assorted in a somewhat uncommon manner. He was a

thorough sportsman in the best sense, but he combined with his sporting

zeal an instinctive hatred of gambling, of bad language, and of tyranny

or cruelty in any form. He entertained a love for the horse in the

stable without bowing down to worship the stage-coachmen, the jockeys,

and other ignoble heroes of "horsey" life. He loved his country and "the

quiet, unpretending Church of England." He was ready to exalt the

obsolescent fisticuffs and the "strong ale of Old England," but he was

not blind either to the drunkenness or to the overbearing brutality which

he had reason to fear might be held to disfigure the character of the

swilling and prize-fighting sections among his compatriots. {20a}

Borrow was a master of whim; but it is easy to exaggerate his

eccentricity. As a traveller who met with adventures upon the roads of

Britain he was surpassed by a dozen writers that could be named, and in

our own day--to mention one--by that truly eccentric being "The Druid."

{20b} The Druid had a special affinity with Borrow, in regard to his

kindness for an old applewoman. His applewoman kept a stall in the

Strand to which the Druid was a constant visitor, mainly for the purpose

of having a chat and borrowing and repaying small sums, rarely exceeding

one shilling. As an author, again, Borrow was as jealous as one of

Thackeray's heroines; he could hardly bear to hear a contemporary book

praised. Whim, if you will, but scarcely an example of literary

eccentricity.

Borrow developed a delightful faculty for adventure upon the high road,

but such a faculty was far less singular than his gift--akin to the

greatest painter's power of suggesting atmosphere--of investing each

scene and incident with a separate and distinct air of uncompromising

reality. Many persons may have had the advantage of hearing conversation

as brilliant or as wise as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is

distinctive of genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the

interlocutors, to suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as

Boswell does, by the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors. The

triumph in each case is one not of opportunities but of the subtlest

literary sense.

Similarly, Borrow's fixed ideas had little that was really exceptional or

peculiar about them. His hatred of mumbo-jumbo and priestcraft was but a

part of his steady love of freedom and sincerity. His linguistic mania

had less of a philological basis than he would have us believe.

Impatience that Babel should act as a barrier between kindred souls, an

insatiable curiosity, prompted by the knowledge that the language of

minorities was in nine cases out of ten the direct route to the heart of

the secret of folks that puzzled him--such were the motives that

stimulated a hunger for strange vocabularies, not in itself abnormal. The

colloquial faculty which he undoubtedly possessed--for we are told by

Taylor that when barely eighteen he already knew English, Welsh, Irish,

Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Danish, French, Italian, and

Portuguese--rarely goes with philological depth any more than with

idiomatic purity. Borrow learnt some languages to translate, many to

speak imperfectly. {22}

But as a comparative philologist, with claims to scientific equipment,

his _Targum_, with its boasted versions from thirty languages or

dialects, pales considerably before the almost contemporary _Philological

Grammar_, based upon a comparison of over sixty tongues, by the Dorset

poet William Barnes, who, like Borrow himself, was a self-taught man. To

mention but two more English contemporaries of Borrow, there was Thomas

Watts, of the British Museum, who could read nearly fifty languages,

including Chinese; and Canon Cook, the editor of the _Speaker's

Commentary_, who claimed acquaintance with fifty-four. It is commonly

said of Cardinal Mezzofanti that he could speak thirty and understand

sixty. It is quite plain from the pages of _Lavengro_ itself that Borrow

did not share Gregory XVI.'s high estimate of the Cardinal's mental

qualifications, unrivalled linguist though he was. That a "word-master"

so abnormal is apt to be deficient in logical sense seems to have been

Borrow's deliberate opinion (with a saving clause as to exceptions), and

I have often thought that it must have been Shakespeare's too, for does

he not ascribe a command of tongues to the man who is perhaps the most

consummate idiot in the whole range of Shakespearean portraiture?

MARIA. That quaffing and drinking will undo you: I heard my lady talk

of it yesterday, and of a foolish knight that you brought in here to

be her wooer.

SIR TOBY BELCH. Who? Sir Andrew Ague-cheek?

MARIA. Ay, he.

SIR TOBY. He's as tall a man as any in Illyria.

MARIA. What's that to the purpose?

SIR TOBY. Why, he has three thousand ducats a year.

MARIA. Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these ducats: he's a very

fool and a prodigal.

SIR TOBY. Fie that you'll say so! He plays o' the viol de gamboys,

and speaks three or four languages word for word, without book.

The extraordinary linguistic gifts of a Mezzofanti were not, it is true,

concentrated in Borrow (whose powers in this direction have been

magnified), but they were sufficiently prominent in him to have a

determining effect upon his mind. Thus he was distinguished less for

broad views than for an extraordinary faculty for detail; when he

attempts to generalise we are likelier to get a flood of inconsequent

prejudices than a steady flow of reasoned opinions.

We can frequently study an author with good effect through the medium of

his literary admirations; we have already noticed a few of Borrow's

predilections in real life. With regard to literature, his predilections

(or more particularly what Zola would call his _haines_) were fully as

protestant and as thorough. His indifference to the literature of his

own time might be termed brutal; his intellectual self-sufficiency was

worthy of a Macaulay or of a Donne. A fellow-denouncer of snobs, he made

Thackeray very uncomfortable by his contemptuous ignorance of _The Snob

Papers_, and even of the name of the periodical in which they were

appearing. Concerning Keats he once asked, "Have they not been trying to

resuscitate him?" When Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he

broke out: "For God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put

them or what to do with them." Scott's _Woodstock_ he picked up more

than once and incontinently threw down as "trashy." As a general rule he

judged a modern author by his prejudices. If these differed by a hair's

breadth from his own he damned the whole of his work. He had to his

credit a vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to be acquainted

with this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was

scarcely knowledge. He was not what one could fairly call unread in the

classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared himself

complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage. He had the

utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody else was

the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest abhorrence.

The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific in cases of

chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough sincerity of his

view than to any conscious subtlety of humour. He disliked Scott

especially for his easy tolerance of Jacobites and Papists, {25} while he

distrusted his portraits, those portraits of the rougher people which may

have frequently been over-praised by Scott's admirers. We most of us

love Scott, it is a fact, beyond the power of nice discrimination. As to

the verisimilitude of a portrait such as that of Meg Merrilies we must

allow Borrow to be a most competent critic, but we are at a loss to

sympathise with his failure to appreciate studies of such lifelike

fidelity as Edie Ochiltree and Andrew Fairservice, whose views anent "the

muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for

her auld hinder end," had so much that was in sympathy with Borrow's own.

Of all such prejudices and peculiarities, no less than of his gifts,

Borrow was ridiculously proud. In certain respects he was as vainly,

querulously, and childishly assertive as Goldsmith himself; while in the

haughty self-isolation with which he eschewed the society of people with

endowments as great or even greater than his own, he was quite the

opposite of "poor Goldy." If the latter had regarded his interlocutors

straight in the eyes with a look that told them he was prepared to knock

them down at a moment's notice upon the least provocation, we should

probably have heard less of his absurdities. A man who even in his old

age could walk off with E. J. Trelawny {27a} under his arm (as Mr. Watts-

Dunton assures us Borrow could) was certainly not one to be trifled with.

Borrow's absolute unconventionality was of course an offence to many; to

Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial

millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a

new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress,

Borrow's pre-railroad prejudices and low tastes appeared obscurantist,

dark, squalid, unintelligible. {27b} He ran out his books upon a line

directly counter to the literary current of the day, and, naturally

enough, the critical billow broke over him.

Hazlitt's proposition--so readily accepted by the smug generation of his

day--that London was the only place in which the child could grow up

completely into the man--would have appeared the most perverse kind of

nonsense to Borrow. The complexity of a modern type, such as that of a

big organiser of industrial labour, did not impress him. He esteemed the

primitive above the economic man, and was apt to judge a human being

rather as Robinson Crusoe might have done than in the spirit of a juryman

at an Industrial Exhibition. Again, his feeling for nature was intimate

rather than enthusiastic, at a time when people still looked for a good

deal of pretty Glover-like composition in their landscapes.

One of the most original traits of Borrow's genius was the care and

obstinacy with which he defended his practical, vigorous and alert

personality against the allurements of word-painting, of Nature and of

Reverie. He could respond to the thrill of natural beauty, he could

enjoy his mood when it veritably came upon him, just as he could enjoy a

tankard of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he

refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused

to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he

refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of dilettante melancholy.

He wrote about his life quite naturally, "as if there were nothing in

it." Another and closely allied cause of perplexity and discontent to

the literary connoisseurs was Borrow's lack of style. By style, in the

generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was

implied something recondite--a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion,

colour and perfume--a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a

sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue. To

a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the

quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of

old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"--"Malo, quam bene

olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the

straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose

vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his choice ill

appreciated by critics whose sense of style demanded that a clear glass

window should be studded with bull's-eyes. To his distinctions of being

a poet well-nigh incapable of verse, and a humourist with marvellously

little pathos, Borrow thus added one which we are inclined to regard as

the greatest of all--that of being a great nineteenth-century

prose-writer without a style.

Though he did not elaborate, or strive to attain to the cultism or polite

style of contemporary genius, Borrow seems to have written with some

difficulty (or at any rate a lack of facility), and, impervious as he was

to criticism, he retained in his prose a number of small faults that he

might easily have got rid of. His manner of introducing his generalities

and conclusions is often either superfluous, or lame and clumsy. Despite

his natural eloquence, his fondness for the apostrophe is excessive; he

preserved an irritating habit of parading such words as _eclat_,

_penchant_ and _monticle_, and persisted in saying "of a verity," and

using the word "individual" in the sense of person. Such blemishes are

microscopic enough. It was not such trifles as these that proved

stumbling-blocks to the "men of blood and foam," as he called his

critics.

Of the generality of the critics of that day it would probably be well

within the mark to aver that their equipment was more solid, and their

competence more assured than that of their successors; {30} it would be

safe to assert that their self-sufficiency was also decidedly more

pronounced. Now for reasons which we have endeavoured to explain, the

equanimity of the critical reviewers was considerably ruffled by

_Lavengro_. Perplexed by its calling itself an autobiography, they were

at the same time discontented both with its subject-matter and its style.

To a not altogether misplaced curiosity on the part of the public as to

Borrow's antecedents, the author of the _Bible in Spain_ had responded by

_Lavengro_, which he fully meant to be (what it indeed was) a

masterpiece. Yet public and critics were agreed in failing to see the

matter in this light. As the reader will probably have deduced from the

foregoing pages, the trouble was mainly due to the following causes.

First, baffled curiosity. Secondly, a dislike for Borrow's prejudices.

Thirdly, a disgust at his philistinism in refusing to bow down and

worship the regnant idols of 'taste.' Fourthly, the total absence in

Borrow of the sentimentality for which the soul of the normal Englishman

yearns. Fifthly, disappointment at not finding the critic's due from an

accepted author in quotable passages of picturesque prose.

These views are appropriately summed up through the medium of the pure

and scentless taste of the _Athenaeum_. The varied contents of

_Lavengro_ are here easily reduced to one denomination--'balderdash,' for

the emission of which the _Athenaeum_ critic proceeds (in the interests,

of course, of the highest gentility), to give George Borrow a good

scolding.

How sadly removed was such procedure from Borrow's own ideal of

reviewing, as set forth in the very volume under consideration! Such

operations should always, he held, be conducted in a spirit worthy of an

editor of Quintilian, in a gentlemanly, Oxford-like manner. No

vituperation! No insinuations! Occasionally a word of admonition, but

gently expressed as an Oxford M.A. might have expressed it. Some one had

ventured to call the _Bible in Spain_ a grotesque book, but the utterance

had been drowned in the chorus of acclamation. Now Borrow complained

that he had had the honour of being rancorously abused by every unmanly

scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and every political and religious

renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by

a swarm of gnats. His worst passions were aroused; his most violent

prejudices confirmed. His literary zeal, never extremely alert, was

sensibly diminished.

This last result at least was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end

had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through

the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked

footprint on the sand. The 'great unknown' had gone down beneath his

associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large

extent revealed _himself_--a primitive man, with his breast by no means

wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem

of a complex humanity: an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone

gives savour to the wearisome process of "civilisation." For the

conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected

by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute

the _genus homo_ of natural history. Perhaps it was only to be expected

that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should

be received with a howl of incredulity.

Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day

Emile Montegut realised _to the full_ the true greatness, the

originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow's work. Writing

in September 1857 upon "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears

in his _Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre_, between studies on "Mistress

Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic

Odyssey":--

"Unfinished and fragmentary, these writings can dispense with a

conclusion, for they have an intrinsic value, and each page bears the

impress of reality. The critic who has to give his impressions of one

of Borrow's books is in much the same case as a critic who had to give

his impressions in turn of the different parts of _Gil Blas_ as they

successively appeared. The work is incomplete, but each several part

is excellent and can be appreciated by itself. Borrow has

resuscitated a literary form which had been many years abandoned, and

he has resuscitated it in no artificial manner--as a rhythmical form

is rehabilitated, or as a dilettante re-establishes for a moment the

vogue of the roundel or the virelay--but quite naturally as the

inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and

the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and

unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and,

above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral

code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and

manner of the _novela picaresca_.

"The huge sensational romance [Sue], the creaking machinery of

melodrama [Boucicault], with which it has been attempted in our own

day to portray certain tableaux of the life of the people, only

succeed, owing to the extravagance of their construction, in

demonstrating the complete ignorance on the part of the writers of the

subject which they pretend to describe. Borrow has not of set purpose

adopted the picaresque form: search his pages where you will, you will

find not a trace of such an intention. He has rediscovered the

picaresque method, as it were instinctively, by the mere fact of his

having to express sentiments of a certain description; he has indeed

rediscovered it by the same process which led Cervantes and Hurtado de

Mendoza to invent it--by virtue of that necessity which always enables

genius to give the most appropriate clothing to its conceptions. To

attain this result, however, it is necessary that genius should not be

thrown off its balance by deliberate ambition, or too much preoccupied

by the immediate desire to succeed. By his conformity to all these

conditions, Borrow has become, without giving a thought to such

purpose, the Quevedo and the Mendoza of modern England."

Beyond all this there is quite another and perhaps an even more potent

reason why the critics of a later generation have felt constrained to

place this work of Borrow's upon a higher pedestal than their

predecessors did.

As within the four angles of a painting there is nothing more difficult

to confine than sunlight and atmosphere, so in literature is it a task of

the highest achievement to compass the wind on the heath, the sunshine

and the rain. We know the dark background, the mystery and the awe of

the forest, how powerfully they are suggested to us by some old writers

and some modern ones, such as Spenser and Fouque, by the author of _The

Pathfinder_ and Thoreau; the scent of the soil, once again, in rain and

in shine, is it not conveyed to us with an astonishing distinctness, that

is the product of a literary endowment of the rarest order, by such

writers as Izaak Walton and Robert Burns, and among recent writers in

varying degrees by Richard Jefferies and by Barnes, by T. E. Brown and

Thomas Hardy? And then there is the kindred touch, hardly if at all less

rare, which evokes for us the camaraderie and blithe spirit of the

highway: the winding road, the flashing stream, the bordering coppice,

the view from the crest, the twinkling lights at nightfall from the

sheltering inn. Traceable in a long line of our most cherished writers,

from Chaucer and Lithgow and Nash, Defoe and Fielding, and Hazlitt and

Holcroft, the fascination of the road that these writers have tried to

communicate, has never perhaps been expressed with a nicer discernment

than in the _Confessions_ of Rousseau, that inveterate pedestrian who

walked Europe to the rhythm of ideas as epoch-making as any that have

ever emanated from the mind of man.

"La chose que je regrette le plus" (writes Rousseau) "dans les details

de ma vie dont j'ai perdu la memoire, est de n'avoir pas fait des

journaux de mes voyages. Jamais je n'ai tant pense, tant existe, tant

vecu, tant ete moi, si j'ose ainsi dire, que dans ceux que j'ai faits

seul et a pied. La marche a quelque chose qui anime et avive mes

idees: je ne puis presque penser quand je reste en place; il faut que

mon corps soit en branle pour y mettre mon esprit. La vue de la

campagne, la succession des aspects agreables, le grand air, le grand

appetit, la bonne sante que je gagne en marchant, la liberte du

cabaret, l'eloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dependance, de

tout ce qui me rappelle a ma situation: tout cela degage mon ame."

It is a possession in a rare degree of this wonderful open-air quality as

a writer that constrains us in our generation to condone any offences

against the mint and anise and cummin decrees of literary infallibility

that Borrow may have from time to time committed. And when it is

realised, in addition, what a unique knowledge he possessed of the daily

life, the traditions, the folk-lore, and the dialects of the strange

races of vagrants, forming such a picturesque element in the life of the

road, the documentary value, as apart from the literary interest of

Borrow's work, becomes more and more manifest.

_Lavengro_ is not a book, it is true, to open sesame to the first comer,

or to yield up one tithe of its charm upon a first acquaintance. Yet, in

spite of the "foaming vipers," as Borrow styles his critics, _Lavengro's_

roots have already struck deep into the soil of English literature, as

Dr. Hake predicted that they would. {37} We know something about the dim

retreating Arcady from Dr. Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers

and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian

London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs.

Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties

from George Eliot. It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild

Nature on the roadside and the heath.

"The personages in these inimitable books are not merely snap-shots,

they are living pictures; and, more than that, the people are moving

about amid fluttering leaves and flickering sunlight and waves of

shadow and rippling brooks. One neither misses the colours of the

landscapes nor the very sounds of the voices. Moreover, the

characters, though we feel that they have never come within the range

of our experience, yet did actually live and move and talk as they are

represented; and we know, too, that such characters have passed away

from our earth--improved off the face of it. And we regret, in spite

of ourselves, that these gypsies are gone. The rogues will never come

back! A feeling of disappointment is apt to come over us as we read,

and we are ready to stop and ask angrily, 'Why can't we drop in among

the tents, and see an Ursula or a Pakomovna, and have our fortunes

told as of yore?' And we know that it cannot be, and that the Romany

Rye is a being who lived and moved in a different age from ours, as

different as the age of Hector and Achilles, when warriors fought in

their chariots round the walls of Troy, and the long-haired Achaians

hurled their spears and stole one another's horses in the darkness,

and kings made long speeches armed to the teeth, and ran away with

other kings' wives or multiplied their own. We go on to confess to

ourselves that we must be content with hearing about all the strange

experience of the Romany Rye at second-hand, and since it must be so,

we shall do well to surrender ourselves to such a magician as this and

make the best of it." {38}

After the publication of the _Romany Rye_ in 1857, Borrow made one more

contribution to Belles Lettres in the book called _Wild Wales_, issued in

three volumes in 1862. It commemorates a journey made in the summer of

1854, while its heroic championship of the Bardic literature recalls the

earlier enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym. If after his return from Spain a

definite sphere of activity abroad could have been allotted to Borrow (by

preference in the East, as he himself desired), we might have had from

his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added

lustre to a group of writers already brilliantly represented in England

by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton. With

Burton's love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of

anthropology in its widest sense, the author of the _Bible in Spain_ had

many points in common. As it was, the later years of Borrow's life were

spent somewhat moodily, and with some of the mystery of Swift's or of

Rousseau's, at Oulton, near Lowestoft, whence, at Christmas 1874, he sent

a message to the neighbouring hermit, Edward Fitzgerald at Woodbridge, in

the vain hope of eliciting a visit. {39a} His wife, who had been won

with her widow's jointure and dower during the flush of his missionary

successes in 1840, died at the end of January 1869, {39b} and on July

26th, 1881, after years spent in a strange seclusion at Oulton, tended

latterly by his step-daughter Henrietta, George Borrow was found dead in

his bed, dying as he had lived, alone. Not long after his death, which

took place when he was seventy-eight, Borrow's Oulton home was pulled

down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the

old summer-house in which he wrote _Lavengro_, and the ragged fir-trees

that sighed the requiem of his last hours. Without appealing to "the

shires," but in the Eastern counties alone, he has been commemorated

since his death by such writers as Henry Dutt, and Whitwell Elwin, by

Egmont Hake, by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and by Dr. Jessopp. And now ere

the close of the century {40} it has fallen to the lot of yet another

East Anglian to place a small stone upon the cairn of George Borrow.

II.

The two books _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ are in reality one work, an

unfinished autobiography, commenced upon a moderate and quite feasible

scale; but after about a third of the ground is covered the scale is

enormously increased, the narrative, encumbered by a vast amount of

detail, makes less and less progress, and finally stops short, without

any obvious, but rather a lame and impotent conclusion, at chapter xlvii.

of the _Romany Rye_, or chapter cxlvii. of the work considered as one

whole. The disproportion of the scale will be sufficiently indicated

when we point out that the first twenty-two years of the author's life

are treated pretty equally in fifty-seven chapters (i. to lvii.). The

remaining ninety chapters (lviii. to cxlvii.) are wholly taken up by the

incidents of less than four months, the four summer months of 1825. The

first twenty-two years of the author's life are far from commonplace. The

interest is well sustained, but is seldom intense,--at no point is the

author's memory sufficiently teeming to cause an overflow; but with the

conclusion of his sojourn in London, May 22nd, 1825, commences an

itinerant life, the novelty of which graves every incident in the most

vivid possible manner upon the writer's recollection. With his

emancipation from town life a new graphic impulse is developed. Borrow

seizes a new palette and sets to work with fresher colours upon a

stupendous canvas. This canvas may be described as taking the form of a

triptych. In the first compartment we have the first sensations of the

roadfarer's life and some minor adventures: a visit to Stonehenge; the

strange meeting with a returned convict, who turns out to be the old

applewoman's son; the vignette of the hostelry, with the figures of the

huge fat landlord and the handmaid Jenny; the visit to the stranger

gentleman who protects himself by "touching" against evil chance; the

interview with the Rev. Mr. Platitude, and the bargain struck with the

travelling tinker, Jack Slingsby, whose stock-in-trade and profession the

writer determines to adopt. Then comes the word-master's detection in

his new sphere of life by the malignant gipsy godmother, Mrs. Herne, from

whose remorseless attempt to poison him he is rescued by the kindly

hearted Welsh preacher Peter Williams and his wife Winifred. In requital

he manages to relieve the good man of a portion of the load of

superstitious terror by which he is burdened. This section of the

narrative is terminated by a graphic description of his renewal of

associateship with his old friend Jasper Petulengro, the satisfaction he

gives that worthy for having been the innocent cause of Mrs. Herne's

death, and his decision to pitch his tent in the dingle. Chapters lviii.

to lxxxii. are taken up with the foregoing incidents, which lead up to

the central episode of the autobiography, the settlement in the dingle,

with which the reader is here presented. This episode, forming the

second panel in the detailed scheme, occupies chapters lxxxiii. to cxvi.,

but it is bisected near the middle by the termination of _Lavengro_ at

chapter c. The two parts are united now for the first time, and are

given a prominent setting in relief from the rest of the narrative. The

third compartment of the triptych, which occupies chapters cxvii. to

cxlvii. (that is, chapters xvii. to xlvii. of the _Romany Rye_), is

devoted to what we may call the horse-dealing episode. After the loss of

Isopel Berners, the Romany Rye, as the author-hero is now termed,

consoles himself by the purchase of a splendid horse, to obtain which he

consents, much against his will, to accept a loan of 50 pounds from

Jasper Petulengro, the product of that worthy's labours in the prize

ring. He travels across England with the horse, meeting with adventures

by the way, narrating them to others, and obtaining some curious

autobiographical narratives in return. Finally he reaches Horncastle,

and sells the animal at the horse fair there for 150 pounds. Here, in

August 1825, the narrative of his life abruptly ends. {43}

It must not be supposed by any means that the interest of Borrow's two

autobiographical volumes is concentrated in the last eighteen chapters of

_Lavengro_ and the first sixteen chapters of the _Romany Rye_. The

quality of continuity is, it is true, best preserved in the dingle

episode. Artistically the Brynhildic figure of Isopel serves as the best

relief that could be found for Borrow's own "Titanic self." There is

undoubtedly a feeling of unity here which is hardly to be felt in any

other part of the Borrovian "Odyssey."

It is nevertheless true that, taken as a whole, a marked characteristic

of the two volumes is the evenness with which the charms are scattered

hither and thither betwixt the four covers. Attractive, therefore, as

the Isopel Berners episode unquestionably is, and convenient as it is to

the reader to have it detached for him in its unity, its perusal must not

be taken for a moment to absolve the lover of good literature from

traversing chapter by chapter, canto by canto, the whole of the Borrevian

epic. It is outside the dingle that he will have to look for the

faithfully described bewilderment of the old applewoman after the loss of

her book, and for the compassionate delineation of the old man with the

bees and the donkey who gave the young Rye to drink of mead at his

cottage, and was unashamed at having shed tears on the road. The most

heroic of the pugilistic encounters takes place, it is true, in the thick

of the dingle, but it is elsewhere that the reader will have to look for

the description of the memorable thrashing inflicted upon the bullying

stage-coachman by the "elderly individual" who followed the craft of

engraving, and learnt fisticuffs from Sergeant Broughton. In the same

neighbourhood he will find the admirable vignette of the old man who

could read the inscription on Chinese crockery pots, but could not tell

what's o'clock, and the life narratives of the jockey and of the inexpert

thimble-rigger, Murtagh, who was imprisoned three years for interrupting

the Pope's game at picquet, but finally won his way by card-sharping to

the very threshold of the Cardinalate. In the second half of the _Romany

Rye_, too, he will find the noble apostrophes to youth, and ale, and

England, "the true country for adventures," which he will compare, as

examples of Borrovian eloquence, with the stirring description of

embattled England in the third chapter of _Lavengro_, or the apostrophe

to the Irish cob and the Author's first ride in chapter thirteen.

Borrow's is a wonderful book for one to lose one's _way_ in, among the

dense undergrowth, but it is a still grander book for the reader to lose

_himself_ in. In the dingle, best of all, he can "forget his own

troublesome personality as completely as if he were in the depths of the

ancient forest along with Gurth and Wamba." Labyrinthine, however, as

the autobiography may at first sight appear, the true lover of Borrow

will soon have little difficulty in finding the patteran or gypsy trail

(for indeed the Romany element runs persistently as a chorus-thread

through the whole of the autobiographical writings), which serves as a

clue to the delights of which his work is so rich a storehouse. The

question that really exercises Borrovians most is the relative merit of

stories and sections of the narrative--the comparative excellence of the

early 'life' in _Lavengro_ and of the later detached episodes in the

_Romany Rye_. Most are in some sort of agreement as to the supremacy of

the dingle episode, which has this advantage: Borrow is always at his

best when dealing with strange beings and abnormal experiences. When he

is describing ordinary mortals he treats them with coldness as mere

strangers. The commonplace town-dwellers seldom arouse his sympathy,

never kindle his enthusiasm. He is quite another being when we wander by

his side within the bounds of his enchanted dingle.

This history of certain doings in a Staffordshire dingle, during the

month of July 1825, begins with a battle-royal, which places Borrow high

amongst the narrators of human conflicts from the days of the Iliad to

those of Pierce Egan; yet the chapters that set forth this episode of the

dingle are less concerned with the "gestes" than with the sayings of its

occupants. Rare, indeed, are the dramatic dialogues amid the sylvan

surroundings of the tree-crowned hollow, that surpass in interest even

the vivid details of the memorable fray between the flaming tinman and

the pugilistic philologer. Pre-eminent amongst the dialogues are those

between the male occupant of the dingle and the popish propagandist,

known as the man in black. More fascinating still, perhaps, are the word-

master's conversations with Jasper; most wonderful of all, in the opinion

of many, is his logomachy with Ursula under the thorn bush. We shall not

readily forget Jasper's complaints that all the 'old-fashioned,

good-tempered constables' are going to be set aside, or his gloomy

anticipations of the iron roads in which people are to 'thunder along in

vehicles pushed forward by fire and smoke.' As for his comparison of the

gypsies to cuckoos, the roguish charring fellows, for whom every one has

a bad word, yet whom every one is glad to greet once again when the

spring comes round, or Ursula's exposition of gypsy love and marriage

beneath the hedge,--these are Borrow at his best, as he is most familiar

to us, in the open air among gypsies. With the popish emissary it is

otherwise: his portrait is the creation of Borrow's most studied hatred.

Yet it must be admitted that the man in black is a triumph of complex

characterisation. A joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine,

sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical

as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting

the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in

ear. For the simple and credulous--crosses and beads; for the

hard-hearted and venal--material considerations; for the cultured and

educated--a fine tissue of epigrams and anthropology; for the

ladies--flattery and badinage. A spiritual ancestor of Anatole France's

marvellous full-length figure of Jerome Coignard, Borrow's conception

takes us back first to Rabelais and secondly to the seventeenth-century

conviction of the profound Machiavellism of Jesuitry.

The man in black and Jasper are great, but the master attraction of the

region that we are to traverse is admittedly Isopel Berners. It will

perhaps be observed that our heroine makes her appearance on the stage

rather more in the fashion of Molly Seagrim than of that other engaging

Amazon of romance, Diana Vernon, whose "long hair streaming in the wind"

forms one single point of resemblance to our fair Isopel. In other

respects, certainly no two heroines could be more dissimilar. Unaided

even by the slightest assistance from the graphic arts, the difficulty of

picturing the lineaments of this muscular beauty, as she first burst on

the sight of our autobiographer upon the declivity of the dingle, may be

freely confessed, ere an attempt is made to describe her. We know,

however, on the testimony of a sincere admirer, that she was over six

feet high, with loose-flowing, flaxen hair; that she wore a tight bodice

and a skirt of blue, to match the colour of her eyes; and that eighteen

summers had passed over her head since she first saw the light in the

great house of Long Melford, a nursery in which she learnt to fear God

and take her own part, and a place the very name of which she came to

regard as a synonym for a strong right arm. Borrow's first impression of

her was one of immensity; she was big enough, he said, to have been born

in a church; almost simultaneously, he observed her affinity to those

Scandinavian divinities to which he assigned the first place in the

pantheon of his affections. She reminded him, indeed, of the legendary

Ingeborg, queen of Norway. It is remarkable, and well worth noticing,

that the impression that she produced was instantaneous. Our wanderer

had never been impressed in any similar fashion by any of the gypsy women

with whom he was brought into contact, though, as many a legend and

ballad can attest, such women have often exerted extraordinary attraction

over Englishmen of pure blood. But it is evident that his physical

admiration was reserved for a tall blonde of the Scandinavian type, to

which he gave the name of a Brynhilde. Hence, notwithstanding his love

of the economics of gypsy life, his gypsy women are for the most part no

more than scenic characters; they clothe and beautify the scene, but they

have little dramatic force about them. And when he comes to delineate a

heroine, Isopel Berners, she is physically the very opposite of a Romany

chi.

Fewer words will suffice to describe Isopel's first impressions of her

future partner in the dingle. She unmistakably regarded him as a

chaffing fellow who was not quite right in his head; and there is reason

for believing, that, though she came to entertain a genuine regard for

the young 'squire,' her opinions as to the condition of his brain

underwent no sensible modification. She herself is fairly explicit on

this subject: she seems indeed to have arrived at the deliberate

conviction that, if not abnormally selfish, he was at any rate

fundamentally mad; and there was perhaps a germ of truth in the

conclusion, sufficient at any rate to colour Lombroso's theory of the

inherent madness of men of genius. One of the testimonies that we have

as to Borrow's later life at Oulton is to the effect that he got

bewildered at times and fancied himself Wodin; but the substratum of

sanity is strongly exhibited in the remedy which he himself applied.

"What do you think I do when I get bewildered after this fashion? I go

out to the sty and listen to the grunting of the pigs until I get back to

myself." {49}

Of Isopel's history we know extremely little, save what she herself tells

us. Her father was an officer who was killed in a naval action before he

could fulfil the promise of marriage he had made to her mother, a small

milliner, who died in the workhouse at Long Melford within three months

of the effort of giving birth to an amazon so large and so fierce and so

well able to take her own part as Isopel. At fourteen this fine specimen

of workhouse upbringing was placed in service, from which she emancipated

herself by knocking down her mistress. After two years more at the

"large house" she was once more apprenticed; and this time knocked down

her master in return for an affront. A second return to the workhouse

appearing inadvisable, she traversed the highways of England in various

capacities, and became acquainted with some of those remarkable though

obscure characters who travelled the roads of our country at that period.

A sense of loneliness drove her among unworthy travelling companions,

such as the flying tinker and grey Moll, in whose society she breaks upon

our notice. Some of the vagrants with whom she came into contact had

occasionally attempted to lay violent hands upon her person and effects,

but had been invariably humbled by her without the aid of either justice

or constable.

Of her specific exploits as a bruiser we hear of at least two near Dover.

Once, the cart she and her old mistress travelled with was stopped by two

sailors, who would have robbed and stripped the owners. "Let me get

down," she exclaimed simply, and so saying she got down, and fought with

them both until they turned round and ran away. On another occasion,

while combing out her long hair beneath a hedge, she was insulted by a

jockey. Starting up, though her hair was unbound, she promptly gave him

what he characterised as "a most confounded whopping," and "the only

drubbing I ever had in my life; and lor, how with her right hand she

fibbed me while she held me round the neck with her left arm! I was soon

glad to beg her pardon on my knees, which she gave me in a moment when

she saw me in that condition, being the most placable creature in the

world, and not only her pardon but one of the hairs which I longed for,

which I put through a shilling for purposes of pleasant deception at

country fairs." The hair with the shilling attached to it eventually

became a treasured possession of the Romany Rye.

Rude as some of these characteristics may appear, we are left in no

manner of doubt as to the essential nobility, befitting her name, of Miss

Berners--her character and bearing. Her carriage, especially of the neck

and shoulders, reminded the postilion of the Marchioness of ---; and he

took her unhesitatingly for a young lady of high rank and distinction,

who had temporarily left her friends, and was travelling in the direction

of Gretna Green with the fortunate Rye. The word-master, in disabusing

the postilion of this idea, gave utterance to the conviction that he

might search the world in vain for a nature more heroic and devoted.

Like a lady of the highest quality, the beauteous queen of the dingle was

subject to the vapours and to occasional fits of inexplicable weeping;

but as a general rule she shared with Borrow himself a proud contempt for

that mad puppy gentility, and her predominant characteristic, like his,

was the simplicity that puzzled by reason of its directness and its

purity. {52} That these qualities were not unaccompanied by a

considerable amount of hauteur, is shown by her uncompromising rejection

of the ceremonial advances made to her by that accomplished courtier, the

man in black.

"Lovely virgin," said he, with a graceful bow and stretching out his

hand, "allow me to salute your fingers."

"I am not in the habit of shaking hands with strangers," said Belle.

"I did not presume to request to shake hands with you," said the man

in black. "I merely wished to be permitted to salute with my lips the

extremities of your two forefingers."

"I never permit anything of the kind," said Belle. "I do not approve

of such unmanly ways."

His importunity is rebuked more forcibly upon another occasion, when the

nymph bids the priest with asperity to "hold his mumping gibberish."

The striking beauty of Belle, especially that of her blue eyes and flaxen

hair, and the impressiveness of her demeanour, calm and proud, which

compelled the similitude to a serious and queenly heroine, such as 'Queen

Theresa of Hungary, or Brynhilda, the Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd,

the serpent-killer,' is emphasised by the contrast drawn between her and

the handsome brunette Mrs. Petulengro, who is for the nonce subjugated by

Isopel's beauty, and craves the privilege of acting as her tire-woman.

Alas, as is so often the case in life, Lavengro and the reader are only

just beginning to realise the beauty and the value of the "bellissima,"

as the man in black calls her, when she is on the point of sinking

beneath our horizon, passing away like the brief music of an aubade.

Rapidly, much too rapidly, do we approach that summer dawn when Belle,

dressed neatly and plainly, her hair no longer plaited in Romany fashion

or floating in the wind, but secured by a comb, uncovered no longer, but

wearing a bonnet, her features very pale, allowed her cold hand to be

wrung--it was for the last time--by the unconscious Rye. The latter

ascended to the plain and thence looked down towards the dingle. "Isopel

Berners stood at the mouth, the beams of the early morning sun shone full

on her noble face and figure. I waved my hands towards her, she slowly

lifted up her right arm; I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners

again."

Hardly less forlorn is the reader than the philologist when the latter

arrives back at the dingle, after a visit to the tavern two miles away,

to find that the tardily recognised treasure is lost to him for

ever,--resolved at length, too late, to give over teasing Belle by

pretending to teach her Armenian, determined, when the need is past, to

regularise his "uncertificated" relations with the glorious damozel, and

resigned, when concession is fruitless, to sink those objections to

America which Belle had disavowed, but which he had been proud to share

with disbanded soldiers, sextons, and excisemen. To this decision his

tortuous conferences with Jasper, and his frank soliloquy in the dingle,

had bent him fully forty-eight hours before Belle's ultimate departure,

unwilling though he was to incur the yoke of matrimony.

"I figured myself in America" (says he, in his reverie over the

charcoal fire), "in an immense forest, clearing the land destined by

my exertions to become a fruitful and smiling plain. Methought I

heard the crash of the huge trees as they fell beneath my axe; and

then I bethought me that a man was intended to marry--I ought to

marry; and if I married, where was I likely to be more happy as a

husband and a father, than in America, engaged in tilling the ground?

I fancied myself in America engaged in tilling the ground, assisted by

an enormous progeny--well, why not marry and go and till the ground in

America? I was young, and youth was the time to marry in and to

labour in; I had the use of all my faculties; my eyes, it is true,

were rather dull from early study, but I could see tolerably well with

them and they were not bleared. I felt my arms and thighs and

teeth--they were strong and sound enough; so now was the time to

labour, to marry, eat strong flesh, and beget strong children--the

power of doing all this would pass away with youth, which was terribly

transitory. I bethought me that a time would come when my eyes would

be bleared and perhaps sightless; my arms and thighs strengthless and

sapless; when my teeth would shake in my jaws, even supposing they did

not drop out. No going a-wooing then, no labouring, no eating strong

flesh and begetting lusty children then; and I bethought me how, when

all this should be, I should bewail the days of my youth as misspent,

provided I had not in them founded for myself a home, and begotten

strong children to take care of me in the days when I could not take

care of myself; and thinking of these things I became sadder and

sadder, and stared vacantly upon the fire until my eyes closed in a

doze."

It is significant that upon his return from the dream that followed this

reverie, the would-be colonist blew upon the embers and filled and heated

the kettle, that he might be able to welcome Isopel with a cup of the

beverage that she loved. It was the newly awakened Benedick brushing his

hat in the morning; but unhappily his conversion was not so complete as

Benedick's. Love-making and Armenian do not go together, and in the

colloquy that ensued, Belle could not feel assured that the man who

proposed to conjugate the verb "to love" in Armenian, was master of his

intentions in plain English. It was even so. The man of tongues lacked

speech wherewith to make manifest his passion; the vocabulary of the word-

master was insufficient to convince the workhouse girl of one of the

plainest meanings a man can well have. From the banter of the man of

learning the queen of the dingle sought refuge in a precipitate flight.

Almost simultaneously the word-master, albeit with reluctance, decided

that it was high time to give over his "mocking and scoffing." When he

returned with this resolve to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it,

never to return.

Yet ever and anon that splendid and pathetic figure will cross the sky

line of his mental vision--and of ours. "Then the image of Isopel

Berners came into my mind," and the thought "how I had lost her for ever,

and how happy I might have been with her in the New World."

DWELLERS IN THE DINGLE,

AND SOME OTHERS.

MEN.

LAVENGRO, _the autobiographer_, _scholar and philologist_ (Lavengro=_word-

master_); _known among the road-faring folk as the Romany rye_, _or young

squire turned gypsy_.

JASPER PETULENGRO, _a Romany kral or tribal chief_, _horse-dealer and

blacksmith_ (petulengro=_lord of the horseshoe_). "_The Gypsy_."

FRASER, _a popish emissary or propagandist_, _known as the_ "_man in

black_." "_The Priest_."

TAWNO CHIKNO, _the little one_, _so called on account of his immense

size_; _the_ "_Antinous of the dusky people_;" _a great horseman and_

JASPER'S _brother-in-law_.

SYLVESTER, _another brother-in-law_, _an ill-conditioned fellow_, "_the

Lazarus of the Romany tribe_."

BLACK _or_ BLAZING JOHN BOSVILLE (_Anselo Herne_), "_the flaming tinman_"

_a_ "_half-in-half_" _itinerant tinker and bruiser_.

CATCHPOLE, _the landlord of a small inn_, _two miles from the Dingle_,

_and not far from Willenhall in Staffordshire_.

MR. HUNTER, _a radical_, _who wears a snuff-coloured coat and frequents

the inn above named_.

_A postilion_, _whose headquarters are The Swan_, _Stafford_.

WOMEN.

ISOPEL _or_ BELLE BERNERS, _the beauteous queen of the Dingle_.

GREY MOLL, _wife of_ BOSVILLE, _the flying tinker_.

_A niece of the landlord of the inn_.

_The three daughters of Mrs. Herne_:--

PAKOMOVNA, (MRS.) PETULENGRO,

MIKAILIA, (MRS.) CHIKNO.

URSULA, _widow of_ LAUNCELOT LOVELL, _who subsequently marries_

SYLVESTER.

ANIMALS.

AMBROL (_in gypsy_=_a pear_), LAVENGRO'S _little gry or pony_.

TRAVELLER, _a donkey_ (_gypsy_, _mailla_), _belonging to_ ISOPEL BERNERS.

THE SCENE _is laid under the greenwood tree_, _in the height of an

English summer_.

THE DINGLE _is a deep_, _wooded_, _and consequently somewhat gloomy_,

_hollow in the middle of a very large_, _desolate field_. _The shelving

sides of the hollow are overgrown with trees and bushes. A belt of

sallows crowns the circular edge of the small crater_. _At the lowest

part of the Dingle are discovered a stone and a fire of charcoal_, _from

which spot a winding path ascends to_ "_the plain_." _On either side of

the fire is a small encampment. One consists of a small pony cart and a

small hut-shaped tent_, _occupied by the word-master_. _On the other

side is erected a kind of tent_, _consisting of large hoops covered over

with tarpaulin_, _quite impenetrable to rain; hard by stands a small

donkey-cart_. _This is_ "_the tabernacle_" _of_ ISOPEL BERNERS. _A

short distance off_, _near a spring of clear water_, _is the encampment

of the Romany chals and chies--the Petulengres and their small clan_.

THE PLACE _is about five miles from Willenhall in Staffordshire_.

THE TIME _is July_ 1825.

CHAPTER I--THE SCHOLAR SAYS GOOD-BYE TO THE GYPSY, AND PITCHES HIS TENT

IN THE DINGLE.

[In May 1825 our autobiographer, known among the gypsies as the

word-master, decided to leave London, and travelled, partly on foot and

partly by coach, to Amesbury; and then, after two days at Salisbury,

struck northwards. A few days later, in a small beer-house, he met a

tinker and his wife; the tinker was greatly depressed, having recently

been intimidated by a rival, one Bosville, "the flaming tinman," and

forced by threats to quit the road. The word-master, who meditated

passing the summer as an amateur vagrant, and had some 15 or 16 pounds in

his pocket, conceived the idea of buying the pony-cart, the implements

and the beat of the tinker, one Jack Slingsby, whose face he remembered

having seen some ten years before. "I want a home and work," he said to

the tinker. "As for a home, I suppose I can contrive to make a home out

of your tent and cart; and as for work, I must learn to be a tinker; it

would not be hard for one of my trade to be a tinker: what better can I

do?" "What about the naming tinman?" said the tinker. "Oh, don't be

afraid on my account," said the word-master: "if I were to meet him, I

could easily manage him one way or the other: I know all kinds of strange

words and names, and, as I told you before, I sometimes hit people when

they put me out."

He accordingly purchases Slingsby's property, and further invests in a

waggoner's frock. To the pony he gives the name of Ambrol, which

signifies in gypsy a pear. He spends a first night under the hedge in a

drizzling rain, and then spends two or three days in endeavouring to

teach himself the mysteries of his new trade. While living in this

solitary way he is detected by Mrs. Herne, an old gypsy woman, "one of

the hairy ones," as she terms herself, who carried "a good deal of

devil's tinder" about with her, and had a bitter grudge against the word-

master. She hated him for having wormed himself, as she fancied, into

the confidence of the gypsies and learned their language. She regarded

him further, as the cause of differences between herself and her sons-in-

law--as an apple of discord in the Romany camp. She employed her

grandchild, Leonora, to open relations in a friendly way with Lavengro,

and then to persuade him to eat of a "drabbed" of poisoned cake. Lavengro

was grievously sick, but was saved in the nick of time by the appearance

upon the scene of a Welsh preacher, Peter Williams, and his wife--two

good souls who wandered over all Wales and the greater part of England,

comforting the hearts of the people with their doctrine, and doing all

the good they could. They never slept beneath a roof, unless the weather

was very severe. The preacher had a heavy burden upon his mind, to wit,

"the sin against the Holy Ghost," committed when he was but a lad.

Lavengro journeys for several days with the preacher and his wife,

assuring the former that in common with most other boys he himself, when

of tender years, had committed twenty such sins and felt no uneasiness

about them. The young man's conversation had the effect of greatly

lightening the despair of the old preacher. The latter begged the word-

master to accompany him into Wales. On the border, however, Lavengro

encountered a gypsy pal of his youthful days, Jasper Petulengro, and

turned back with him. Mr. Petulengro informs him of the end of his old

enemy, Mrs. Herne. Baffled in her designs against the stranger, the old

woman had hanged herself.

"You observe, brother," said Petulengro, springing from his horse, "there

is a point at present between us. There can be no doubt that you are the

cause of Mrs. Herne's death--innocently, you will say, but still the

cause. Now I shouldn't like it to be known that I went up and down the

country with a pal who was the cause of my mother-in-law's death: that is

to say, unless he gave me satisfaction." So they fell to with their

naked fists on a broad strip of grass in the shade under some lofty

trees. In half an hour's time Lavengro's face was covered with blood,

whereupon Mr. Petulengro exclaimed, "Put your hands down, brother: I'm

satisfied; blood has been shed, which is all that can be expected for an

old woman who carried so much brimstone about with her as Mrs. Herne."]

So we resumed our route, Mr. Petulengro sitting sideways on his horse,

and I driving my little pony-cart; and when we had proceeded about three

miles, we came to a small public-house, which bore the sign of the

"Silent Woman," where we stopped to refresh our cattle and ourselves; and

as we sat over our bread and ale, it came to pass that Mr. Petulengro

asked me various questions, and amongst others, how I intended to dispose

of myself. I told him that I did not know; whereupon, with considerable

frankness, he invited me to his camp, and told me that if I chose to

settle down amongst them, and become a Rommany chal, {61} I should have

his wife's sister, Ursula, who was still unmarried, and occasionally

talked of me.

I declined his offer, assigning as a reason the recent death of Mrs.

Herne, of which I was the cause, although innocent. "A pretty life I

should lead with those two," said I, "when they came to know it." "Pooh,"

said Mr. Petulengro, "they will never know it. I shan't blab, and as for

Leonora, that girl has a head on her shoulder's." "Unlike the woman in

the sign," said I, "whose head is cut off. You speak nonsense, Mr.

Petulengro: as long as a woman has a head on her shoulders she'll

talk,--but, leaving women out of the case, it is impossible to keep

anything a secret; an old master of mine told me so long ago. I have

moreover another reason for declining your offer. I am at present not

disposed for society. I am become fond of solitude. I wish I could find

some quiet place to which I could retire to hold communion with my own

thoughts, and practise, if I thought fit, either of my trades." "What

trades?" said Mr. Petulengro. "Why, the one which I have lately been

engaged in, or my original one, which I confess I should like better,

that of a kaulomescro." {62} "Ah, I have frequently heard you talk of

making horseshoes," said Mr. Petulengro. "I, however, never saw you make

one, and no one else that I am aware, I don't believe. Come, brother,

don't be angry,--it's quite possible that you may have done things which

neither I nor any one else has seen you do, and that such things may some

day or other come to light, as you say nothing can be kept secret. Be

that, however, as it may, pay the reckoning, and let us be going. I

think I can advise you to just such a kind of place as you seem to want."

"And how do you know that I have got wherewithal to pay the reckoning?" I

demanded. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro, "I was just now looking in

your face, which exhibited the very look of a person conscious of the

possession of property; there was nothing hungry or sneaking in it. Pay

the reckoning, brother."

And when we were once more upon the road Mr. Petulengro began to talk of

the place which he conceived would serve me as a retreat under present

circumstances. "I tell you frankly, brother, that it is a queer kind of

place, and I am not very fond of pitching my tent in it, it is so

surprisingly dreary. It is a deep dingle in the midst of a large field,

on an estate about which there has been a lawsuit for some years past. I

daresay you will be quiet enough, for the nearest town is five miles

distant, and there are only a few huts and hedge public-houses in the

neighbourhood. Brother, I am fond of solitude myself, but not that kind

of solitude: I like a quiet heath, where I can pitch my house, but I

always like to have a gay stirring place not far off, where the women can

pen dukkerin, {63a} and I myself can sell or buy a horse, if needful--such

a place as the Chong Gav. {63b} I never feel so merry as when there,

brother, or on the heath above it, where I taught you Rommany."

Shortly after this discourse we reached a milestone, and a few yards from

the milestone, on the left hand, was a cross-road. Thereupon Mr.

Petulengro said, "Brother, my path lies to the left; if you choose to go

with me to my camp, good; if not, Chal Devlehi." {63c} But I again

refused Mr. Petulengro's invitation, and, shaking him by the hand,

proceeded forward alone, and about ten miles farther on I reached the

town of which he had spoken, and following certain directions which he

had given, discovered, though not without some difficulty, the dingle

which he had mentioned. It was a deep hollow in the midst of a wide

field, the shelving sides were overgrown with trees and bushes, a belt of

sallows surrounded it on the top, a steep winding path led down into the

depths, practicable, however, for a light cart, like mine; at the bottom

was an open space, and there I pitched my tent, and there I contrived to

put up my forge, "I will here ply the trade of kaulomescro," {64} said I.