to please him: "There are passages in your book equal to De Foe."

The preface when eventually submitted to John Murray disturbed him somewhat. "It is quaint," he writes to Mrs Borrow, "but so is everything that Mr Borrow writes." He goes on to suggest that the latter portion looks too much as if it had been got up in the interests of "Papal aggression," and he calls attention to the oft- repeated "Damnation cry". There appears to have been some modification, a few "Damnation Cries" omitted, the last sheet passed for press, and on 7th February 1851 Lavengro was published in an edition of three thousand copies, which lasted for twenty-one years.

The appearance of Lavengro was indeed sensational: but not quite in the way its publisher had anticipated. Almost without exception the verdict was unfavourable. The book was attacked vigorously. The keynote of the critics was disappointment. Some reviews were purely critical, others personal and abusive, but nearly all were disapproving. "Great is our disappointment" said the Athenaeum. "We are disappointed," echoed Blackwood. Among the few friendly notices was that of Dr Hake, in which he prophesied that "Lavengro's roots will strike deep into the soil of English letters." Even Ford wrote (8th March):

"I frankly own that I am somewhat disappointed with the very LITTLE you have told us about YOURSELF. I was in hopes to have a full, true, and particular account of your marvellously varied and interesting biography. I do hope that some day you will give it to us."

In this chorus of dispraise Borrow saw a conspiracy. "If ever a book experienced infamous and undeserved treatment," he wrote, {390a} "it was that book. I was attacked in every form that envy and malice could suggest." In The Romany Rye he has done full justice to the subject, exhibiting the critics with blood and foam streaming from their jaws. In the original draft of the Advertisement to the same work he expresses himself as "proud of a book which has had the honour of being rancorously abused and execrated by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and EVERY POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS RENEGADE in Britain." A few years previously, Borrow had written to John Murray, "I have always myself. If you wish to please the public leave the matter [the revision of The Zincali] to me." {391a} From this it is evident that Borrow was unprepared for anything but commendation from critics and readers.

Dr Bowring had some time previously requested the editor of The Edinburgh Review to allow him to review Lavengro; but no notice ever appeared. In all probability he realised the impossibility of writing about a book in which he and his family appeared in such an unpleasant light. It is unlikely that he asked for the book in order to prevent a review appearing in The Edinburgh, as has been suggested.

In the Preface, Lavengro is described as a dream; yet there can be not a vestage of doubt that Borrow's original intention had been to acknowledge it as an autobiography. This work is a kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style, he had written in 1844. This he contradicted in the Appendix to The Romany Rye; yet in his manuscript autobiography {391b} (13th Oct. 1862) he says: "In 1851 he published Lavengro, a work in which he gives an account of his early life." Why had Borrow changed his mind?

When Lavengro was begun, as a result of Ford's persistent appeals, Borrow was on the crest of the wave of success. He saw himself the literary hero of the hour. The Bible in Spain was selling in its thousands. The press had proclaimed it a masterpiece. He had seen himself a great man. The writer of a great book, however, does not occupy a position so kinglike in its loneliness as does gentleman a gypsy, round whom flock the gitanos to kiss his hand and garments as if he were a god or a hero. The literary and social worlds that The Bible in Spain opened to Borrow were not to be awed by his mystery, or, disciplined into abject hero-worship by one of those steady penetrating gazes, which cowed jockeys and alguacils. They claimed intellectual kinship and equality, the very things that Borrow had no intention of conceding them. He would have tolerated their "gentility nonsense" if they would have acknowledged his paramountcy. He found that to be a social or a literary lion was to be a tame lion, and he was too big for that. His conception of genius was that it had its moods, and mediocrity must suffer them.

Borrow would rush precipitately from the house where he was a guest; he would be unpardonably rude to some inoffensive and well-meaning woman who thought to please him by admiring his books; he would magnify a fight between their respective dogs into a deadly feud between himself and the rector of his parish: thus he made enemies by the dozen and, incidentally, earned for himself an extremely unenviable reputation. A hero with a lovable nature is twice a hero, because he is possessed of those qualities that commend themselves to the greater number. Wellington could never be a serious rival in a nation's heart to dear, weak, sensitive, noble Nelson, who lived for praise and frankly owned to it.

Borrow's lovable qualities were never permitted to show themselves in public, they were kept for the dingle, the fireside, or the inn- parlour. That he had a sweeter side to his nature there can be no doubt, and those who saw it were his wife, his step-daughter, and his friends, in particular those who, like Mr Watts-Dunton and Mr A. Egmont Hake, have striven for years to emphasise the more attractive part of his strange nature.

Borrow's attitude towards literature in itself was not calculated to gain friends for him. He was uncompromisingly and caustically severe upon some of the literary idols of his day, men who have survived that terrible handicap, contemporary recognition and appreciation.

He was not a deep reader, hardly a reader at all in the accepted meaning of the word. He frankly confessed that books were to him of secondary importance to man as a subject for study. In his criticisms of literature, he was apt to confuse the man with his works. His hatred of Scott is notorious; it was not the artist he so cordially disliked, but the politician; he admitted that Scott "wrote splendid novels about the Stuarts." {393a} He hailed him as "greater than Homer;" {393b} but the House of Stuart he held in utter detestation, and when writing or speaking of Scott he forgot to make a rather necessary distinction. He wrote:

"He admires his talents both as a prose writer and a poet; as a poet especially. {393c} . . . As a prose writer he admires him less, it is true, but his admiration for him in that capacity is very high, and he only laments that he prostituted his talents to the cause of the Stuarts and gentility . . . in conclusion, he will say, in order to show the opinion which he entertains of the power of Scott as a writer, that he did for the spectre of the wretched Pretender what all the kings of Europe could not do for his body--placed it on the throne of these realms." {393d}

In later years Borrow paid a graceful tribute to Scott's memory. When at Kelso, in spite of the rain and mist, he "trudged away to Dryburgh to pay my respects to the tomb of Walter Scott, a man with whose principles I have no sympathy, but for whose genius I have always entertained the most intense admiration." {393e} It was just the same with Byron, "for whose writings I really entertained considerable admiration, though I had no particular esteem for the man himself." {393f}

With Wordsworth it was different, and it was his cordial dislike of his poetry that prompted Borrow to introduce into The Romany Rye that ineffectual episode of the man who was sent to sleep by reading him. Tennyson he dismissed as a writer of "duncie books."

For Dickens he had an enthusiastic admiration as "a second Fielding, a young writer who . . . has evinced such talent, such humour, variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his readers, at least those who have the capacity to comprehend him." {394a} He was delighted with The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

His reading was anything but thorough, in fact he occasionally showed a remarkable ignorance of contemporary writers. Mr A. Egmont Hake tells how:

"His conversation would sometimes turn on modern literature, with which his acquaintance was very slight. He seemed to avoid reading the products of modern thought lest his own strong opinions should undergo dilution. We were once talking of Keats whose fame had been constantly increasing, but of whose poetry Borrow's knowledge was of a shadowy kind, when suddenly he put a stop to the conversation by ludicrously asking, in his strong voice, 'Have they not been trying to resuscitate him?'" {394b}

By the time that Lavengro appeared, Borrow was estranged from his generation. The years that intervened between the success of The Bible in Spain and the publication of Lavengro had been spent by him in war; he had come to hate his contemporaries with a wholesome, vigorous hatred. He would give them his book; but they should have it as a stray cur has a bone--thrown at them. Above all, they should not for a moment be allowed to think that it contained an intimate account of the life of the supreme hater who had written it. When there had been sympathy between them, Borrow was prepared to allow his public to peer into the sacred recesses of his early life. Now that there was none, he denied that Lavengro was more than "a dream", forgetting that he had so often written of it as an autobiography, had even seen it advertised as such, and insisted that it was fiction.

When Lavengro was published Borrow was an unhappy and disappointed man. He had found what many other travellers have found when they come home, that in the wilds he had left his taste and toleration for conventional life and ideas. The life in the Peninsula had been thoroughly congenial to a man of Borrow's temperament: hardships, dangers, imprisonments,--they were his common food. He who had defied the whole power of Spain, found himself powerless to prevent his Rector from keeping a dog, or a railway line from being cut through his own estate and his peace of mind disturbed by the rumble of trains and the shriek of locomotive-whistles. He had beaten the Flaming Tinman and Count Ofalia, but Samuel Morton Peto had vanquished and put him to flight by virtue of an Act of Parliament, in all probability without being conscious of having achieved a signal victory. Borrow's life had been built up upon a wrong hypothesis: he strove to adapt, not himself to the Universe; but the Universe to himself.

It is easy to see that a man with this attitude of mind would regard as sheer vindictiveness the adverse criticism of a book that he had written with such care, and so earnest an endeavour to maintain if not improve upon the standard created in a former work. It never for