Royal Asiatic Society an excellent Romany vocabulary of over four hundred words.

These were Borrow’s chief predecessors, but the list could be largely extended by making it include such names as those of Sir John Popham (1531-1607), Lord Chief-Justice of England; Sir William Sinclair, Lord Justice-General of Scotland from 1559; Mr. William Sympsoune, a great Scottish doctor of medicine towards the close of the sixteenth century; the Countess of Cassillis (1643), who did not elope with Johnnie Faa; Richard Head (c. 1637-86), the author of The English Rogue; William Marsden (1754-1836), the Orientalist; John Wilson (“Christopher North,” 1785-1854); the Rev. John Baird, minister of Yetholm 1829-61; G. P. R. James (1801-60), the novelist; and Sam Bough (1822-78), the landscape-painter.  And after Borrow come many; the following are but a few of them:—John Phillip, R.A., Tom Taylor, the Rev. T. W. Norwood, George S. Phillips (“January Searle”), Charles Kingsley, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland (“Hans Breitmann”), Prof. Edward Henry Palmer, Sir Richard Burton,

Bath C. Smart, M.D., of Manchester, Mr. H. T. Crofton, Major Whyte-Melville, Mr. Joseph Lucas, the Rev. R. N. Sanderson, Dr. D. Fearon Ranking, Mr. David MacRitchie, Mr. G. R. Sims, Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, “F. W. Carew, M.D,” and Mr. John Sampson.

Thus, leaving aside all the foreign Romany Ryes, from the great engraver Jacques Callot to the present Polish novelist Sienkiewicz, we see that Borrow was not quite so sui generis as he claimed for himself, and as others have often claimed for him.  The meagreness of his knowledge of the Anglo-Gypsy dialect came out in his Word-Book of the Romany (1874); there must have been over a dozen Englishmen who have known it far better than he.  For his Spanish-Gypsy vocabulary in The Zincali he certainly drew largely either on Richard Bright’s Travels through Lower Hungary or on Bright’s Spanish authority, whatever that may have been.  His knowledge of the strange history of the Gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil.  And yet I would put George Borrow above every other writer on the Gypsies.  In Lavengro and, to a less degree, in its sequel, The Romany Rye, he communicates a subtle insight into Gypsydom that is totally wanting in the works—mainly philological—of Pott, Liebich, Paspati, Miklosich, and their

confrères.  Take his first meeting with Gypsies in the green lane near Norman Cross.  There are flaws in it: he never would have spoken of the Gypsy beldame as “my mother there,” nor could he possibly have guessed that the Romany sap means “snake.”  Yet compare it with Maggie Tulliver’s Gypsy adventure in The Mill on the Floss: how vivid and vigorous the one, how tame and commonplace the other.  I am not going to dilate on the beauties of Lavengro; they seem to me sufficiently self-evident.  But there is one point about the book that deserves some considering, its credibility as autobiography.  Professor Knapp, Borrow’s biographer, seems to place implicit confidence in Lavengro; I find myself unable to agree with him.  Borrow may really have written the story of Joseph Sell for a collection of Christmas tales; he may really have camped for some weeks as a tinker near Willenhall; “Belle Berners” may really have had some prototype; and he may really have bought the splendid horse of the Willenhall tavern-keeper, and sold it afterwards at Horncastle.  But is the “Man in Black,” then, also a reality, and the “Reverend Mr. Platitude,” who thanks God that he has left all his Church of England prejudices in Italy? in other words, did Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by Keble’s sermon?  David Haggart, again, the Scottish Jack Sheppard,—Borrow describes him as “a lad of some fifteen years,”

with “prodigious breadth of chest,” and as defeating in single combat a full-grown baker’s apprentice.  Borrow well may have seen him, for in July 1813 he really enlisted as a drummer in Borrow’s father’s regiment, newly quartered in Edinburgh Castle; but he was not fifteen then, only twelve years old.  And the Jew pedlar scene in the first chapter, and the old apple-woman’s son in the sixty-second!

One might take equal exception to Borrow’s pretended visits to Iceland, Moultan, and Kiachta (he was never within three thousand miles of Kiachta); to his translation of St. Luke’s Gospel into Basque, of which he had only the merest smattering; and to his statement to a Cornish clergyman in 1854 that his “horrors” were due to the effects of Mrs. Herne’s poison—he had suffered from them seven years before his Gypsy wanderings.  But the strongest proof of his lax adherence to fact is adduced by Professor Knapp himself.  In chapter xvi. of Lavengro, Borrow relates how in 1818, at Tombland Fair, Norwich, he doffed his hat to the great trotting stallion, Marshland Shales, “drew a deep ah! and repeated the words of the old fellows around, ‘Such a horse as this we shall never see again; a pity that he is so old.’”  Yes, but as Professor Knapp has found out, with his infinite painstaking, Marshland Shales (1802-35) was not thus paraded until 12th April 1827.

Lavengro [0a] was written in 1843-50, years after the events recorded there.  Several of its petty slips are probably due to sheer forgetfulness; e.g., as to the four “airts” of Edinburgh Castle, and the “lofty” town-walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed.  And the rest, I imagine, were due partly to love of posing, but much more to an honest desire to produce an amusing and interesting book.  Borrow was not writing a set autobiography, and it seems rather hard to imagine that he was, and then to come down on this or that inaccuracy.  He did pose, though, all his life long, and in every one of his writings.  He posed to poor old Esther Faa Blythe, the “queen” of the Yetholm Tinklers, when, on entering her little cottage, he “flung his arms up three times into the air, and in an exceedingly disagreeable voice exclaimed, ‘Sossi your nav?’ etc.”  (Word-Book, p. 314).  He posed shamefully to Lieut.-Col. Elers Napier (Knapp, i. 308-312); and he posed even to me, a mere lad, when I saw him thrice in 1872-73, at Ascot, at his house in Hereford Square, and at the Notting-hill Potteries (Bookman, Feb. 1893, pp. 147-48).  Yet, what books he has given us, the very best of them Lavengro; its fight with the Flaming

Tinman is the finest fight in all the world’s literature.  Lavengro, nevertheless, met with a very sorry reception.  It was not genteel enough for the readers of Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton; and it is only since Borrow’s death, on 26th July 1881, that it has won its due place of pre-eminence.  “No man’s writing,” says Mr. Watts-Dunton, “can take you into the country as Borrow’s can; it makes you feel the sunshine, smell the flowers, hear the lark sing and the grasshopper chirp.”  They who would know Borrow thoroughly should pass from his own works to Mr. Watts-Dunton’s “Reminiscences of George Borrow” (Athenæum, Sept. 3, 10, 1881), to his “Notes upon George