folk-songs, and the like in rococo English translations after the Bowring pattern led Borrow to exchange an attorney’s office for a garret in Grub-street.  His immediate ambition was something between Goldsmith’s and Chatterton’s ballads, Homeric odes, epics, plays; he was, at all hazards, to write something grand—“to be stared at, lifted on peoples’ shoulders.”  He found his Griffiths in Sir Richard Phillips, the radical alderman and philanthropic sweater, under whose tender mercies he rapidly developed a suicidal tendency, until in May, 1825, a windfall of £20 enabled him to break his chain and escape to the highway and the dingle and the picturesque group of moochers and gipsies enshrined for ever in the pages of “Lavengro.”  The central portion of this marvellous composition is occupied by the Dingle episode, in which Lavengro (the “word-master,” Borrow’s gipsy name for himself) is revealed to us in conflict with “the flaming Tinman” and in colloquy with his Romany friend, Jasper Petulengro, with a subtle papistical propagandist, “the man in black,” with the typical gipsy chi, Ursula, and with the peerless Isopel Berners.  His account of his relations with her we take to be strictly and almost literally accurate.  He was powerfully attracted by the magnanimity of spirit no less than by the physical charm of this Brynhildic damsel, tall, straight, and blonde, with loose-flowing flaxen hair, and with a carriage, especially of the neck and shoulders, which reminded the postilion of a certain marchioness of his acquaintance.  But Borrow was of a cold temperament, a despiser and mistruster of young women, whom he regarded primarily as invaluable repositories of nursery lore, folk-song, tradition, and similar toys, about which his male friends were apt to be reticent.  The attraction was so strong that he had serious thoughts of emigrating with “the beauteous Queen of the Dingle,” but he dallied with the idea with characteristic waywardness until it was too late.  He sought to postpone awkward decisions, to divert himself and amuse Isopel by making his charmer learn Armenian—the language which he happened at the time to be studying.  Isopel bore with it for some time, but the imposition of the verb “to love” in Armenian convinced her that the word-master was not only insane, but also inhuman.  Love-making and Armenian do not go well together, and Belle could not feel 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.  When the distracted Borrow had reached the decision that it was high time to give over his “mocking and scoffing,” and returned with this resolve to the dingle, Isopel Berners had quitted it, never to return.  She ran away to the nearest sea-port, and took shipping to America.  Lavengro with some anguish steeled his heart against following her.  The scene of these transactions was a wooded glen or dingle a few miles from Willenhall, in Staffordshire, where Lavengro and Isopel were encamped in their respective tents, having as their neighbours the gipsy clan of which Jasper was the chief.  Upon the whole the Dingle chapters are perhaps the most brilliant and the most enduring that Borrow ever achieved.  Their interest is greatly enhanced by the fact that they are probably a naked transcript from actual fact, for Borrow was a poor hand at invention.  He rarely, if ever, invented a character.  His surest source of inspiration was the unadorned truth.

After the experience of a summer in the open, Borrow, who was now twenty-two, relapsed into the indifferent versification of Danish ballads and Welsh bards, was severely fleeced in obscure journeyings in Southern Europe, and so gained some experience for future use, vainly sought a post, on the strength