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INTRODUCTION 5

A. C. SWINBURNE to face page 8

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 18

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 70

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, AET 80, 120

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 178

MRS. ROSSETTI 182

DR. GORDON HAKE 208

WILLIAM MORRIS 240

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME 278

Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton, there were circumstances in our intercourse--circumstances, I mean, connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience--which make me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or broke more thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated him from all but a few. However, be this as it may, no one at least realized more fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all his angularities--how simple and courageous, how manly and noble. His shyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people, and consequently those who at any time during his life really understood him must have been very few. How was it, then, that such a man wandered about over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspicious and intractable as the gipsies? A natural enough question, which I have often been asked, and this is my reply:--

Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews were well over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating bluntness, a pronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm the suspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it was genuine. Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsy friends very likely stood first--outside, of course, his family circle. And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstanding certain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are the only people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity . It is no less an honour to them, for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentleman than him they called the "Romany Rye."

Borrow's descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply charged with the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy a more matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he is anything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or so trustworthy. But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was, before everything else, a poet. If this statement should be challenged by "the present time," let me tell the present time that by poet I do not mean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and that kind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeing through "the shows of things" and knowing where he is--the gift of drinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Nature for so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffable pathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live, having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and for companions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women. In this sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his love of adventure, very high among poets--as high, perhaps, as I place another dweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, "the well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap," who, like Borrow, is famous for "his great knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record," and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, "on the accent of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature's life," is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel. "Enjoying the pleasure of Nature's life!" That is what Borrow did; and how few there are that understand it.

As a vigorous old man Borrow never had an equal, I think. There has been much talk of the vigour of Shelley's friend, E. J. Trelawny. I knew that splendid old corsair, and admired his agility of limb and brain; but at seventy Borrow could have walked off with Trelawny under his arm. At seventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o'clock in Hereford Square, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton, roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Ponds with a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, run about the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter Scott's eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to Hereford Square, getting home late at night.

His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle, his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect of this kind of eccentric humour. "A duncie book--of course it's duncie--it's only duncie books that sell nowadays," he would shout when some new "immortal poem" or "greatest work of the age" was mentioned. Tennyson, I fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was not the latest juvenile representative of a "duncie" age; for although, according to Leland, the author of 'Sordello' is the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less "duncie." As a trap to catch the "foaming vipers," his critics, he in 'Lavengro' purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given "zhats" as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody in England, especially every critic, ought to know that "zhats" is the accusative form.

I will try, however, to give the reader an idea of the whim of Borrow's conversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form. Let the reader suppose himself on a summer's evening at that delightful old roadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near Richmond Park, where are sitting, over a "cup" of foaming ale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance, a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow and nearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow's shyness, as may be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained, half-resentful expression on his face. Jerry Abershaw's sword has been introduced, and Borrow's old friend has been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that ever fresh and fruitful topic, but in vain. Suddenly the song of a nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and romance. "That nightingale has as fine a voice," says Borrow, "as though he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties." Borrow is proud of being an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set himself, of melting Lavengro's frost and being admitted a member of the Open-Air Club. "Ah!" says the wily-student, "I know the Eastern Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales." Borrow's face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales. Borrow's face begins to get brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, as though he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of his beloved Norfolk.

"From which well-known fact of ornithology," continues the student, "I am driven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guided not so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste." Borrow's anger is evidently melting away. The talk runs still upon nightingales, and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once made by Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales' eggs from England into robins' nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, after enjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, after the custom of English nightingales. "And did they return?" says Borrow, with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved in the question. "Return to Scotland?" says the student quietly; "the entire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning to Scotland. Besides, the nightingales' eggs in question were laid in Norfolk." Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood to the impudent student , and proceeds without more ado to tell how "poor Jerry Abershaw," on being captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree.

From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics, such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the now neglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of the noble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase and rescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasion rescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who had been set upon her by some noble lord or another. Then, while the ale sparkles with a richer colour as the evening lights grow deeper, the talk gets naturally upon "lords" in general, gentility nonsense, and "hoity-toityism" as the canker at the heart of modern civilization.

All this Borrow understood better than any man I have ever met. Yet even into his doctrine of Providence Borrow imported such an element of whim that it was impossible to listen to him sometimes without a smile. For instance, having arrived at the conclusion that a certain lieutenant had been cruelly ill used by genteel magnates high in office, Borrow discovered that since that iniquity Providence had frowned on the British arms, and went on to trace the disastrous blunder of Balaklava to this cause. Again, having decided that Sir Walter Scott's worship of gentility and Jacobitism had been the main cause of the revival of flunkeyism and Popery in England, Borrow saw in the dreadful monetary disasters which overclouded Scott's last days the hand of God, whose plan was to deprive him of the worldly position Scott worshipped at the very moment when his literary fame was dazzling the world.

And now as to the gipsy wanderings. As I have said, no man has been more entirely misunderstood than Borrow. That a man who certainly did look like a "colossal clergyman" should have joined the gipsies, that he should have wandered over England and Europe, content often to have the grass for his bed and the sky for his hostry-roof, has astonished very much this age. My explanation of the matter is this: Among the myriads of children born into a world of brick and mortar there appears now and then one who is meant for better things--one who exhibits unmistakable signs that he inherits the blood of those remote children of the open air who, according to the old Sabaean notion, on the plains of Asia lived with Nature, loved Nature and were loved by her, and from whom all men are descended. George Borrow was one of those who show the olden strain. Now, for such a man, born in a country like England, where the modern fanaticism of house-worship has reached a condition which can only be called maniacal, what is there left but to try for a time the gipsy's tent? On the Continent house-worship is strong enough in all conscience; but in France, in Spain, in Italy, even in Germany, people do think of something beyond the house. But here, where there are no romantic crimes, to get a genteel house, to keep a genteel house, or to pretend to keep a genteel house, is the great first cause of almost every British delinquency, from envy and malignant slander up to forgery, robbery, and murder. And yet it is a fact, as Borrow discovered , that to men in health the house need not, and should not, be the all-absorbing consideration, but should be quite secondary to considerations of honesty and sweet air, pure water, clean linen, good manners, freedom to migrate at will, and, above all, freedom from "all cares or fears of law" that may come against a man in the shape of debts, duns, and tax-gatherers.

Against this folly of softening our bodies by "snugness" and degrading our souls by "flunkeyism," Borrow's early life was a protest. He saw that if it were really unwholesome for man to be shone upon by the sun, blown upon by the winds, and rained upon by the rain, like all the other animals, man would never have existed at all, for sun and wind and rain have produced him and everything that lives. He saw that for the cultivation of health, honesty, and good behaviour every man born in the temperate zone ought, unless King Circumstance says "No," to spend in the open air eight or nine hours at least out of the twenty-four, and ought to court rather than to shun Nature's sweet shower-bath the rain, unless, of course, his chest is weak.

I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero. From my childhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such as the Cagots, but especially in the persecuted children of Roma. I had read accounts of whole families being executed in past times for no other crime than that of their being born gipsies, and tears, childish and yet bitter, had I shed over their woes. Now Borrow was the recognized champion of the gipsies--the friend companion, indeed, of the proscribed and persecuted races of the world. Nor was this all: I saw in him more of the true Nature instinct than in any other writer--or so, at least, I imagined. To walk out from a snug house at Rydal Mount for the purpose of making poetical sketches for publication seemed to me a very different thing from having no home but a tent in a dingle, or rather from Borrow's fashion of making all Nature your home. Although I would have given worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon his back, I could not do it. Morning after morning did I see him undress, wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress, and then stride away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speak to him; and many years passed before I saw him again. He was then half forgotten.

For an introduction to him at last I was indebted to Dr. Gordon Hake, the poet, who had known Borrow for many years, and whose friendship Borrow cherished above most things--as was usual, indeed, with the friends of Dr. Hake. This was done with some difficulty, for, in calling at Roehampton for a walk through Richmond Park and about the Common, Borrow's first question was always, "Are you alone?" and no persuasion could induce him to stay unless it could be satisfactorily shown that he would not be "pestered by strangers." On a certain morning, however, he called, and suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced. He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the Lavengro of my boyhood still. My own shyness had been long before fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was, yet I attacked it manfully. I knew that Borrow had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Borrow as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance.

It is such delightful reminiscences as these that will cause me to have as long as I live a very warm place in my heart for the memory of George Borrow.

Students of Borrow will be as much surprised as pleased to find what a large collection of documents Dr. Knapp has been able to use in compiling this long-expected biography. Indeed, the collection might have been larger and richer still. For instance, in the original manuscript of 'Zincali' there are some variations from the printed text; but, what is of very much more importance, the whole--or nearly the whole--of Borrow's letters to the Bible Society, which Dr. Knapp believed to be lost, have been discovered in the crypt of the Bible House in which the records of the Society are stored. But even without these materials two massive volumes crammed with documents throwing light upon the life and career of a man like George Borrow must needs be interesting to the student of English literature. For among all the remarkable characters that during the middle of the present century figured in the world of letters, the most eccentric, the most whimsical, and in every way the most extraordinary was surely the man whom Dr. Knapp calls, appropriately enough, his "hero."

It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a single point in which Borrow resembled any other writing man of his time; indeed, we cannot, at the moment, recall any really important writer of any period whose eccentricity of character can be compared with his. At the basis of the artistic temperament is generally that "sweet reasonableness" the lack of which we excuse in Borrow and in almost no one else. As to literary whim, it must not be supposed that this quality is necessarily and always the outcome of temperament. There are some authors of whom it may be said that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their "literary mood," a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born of temperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect. Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim , passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which, as "Yorick," he tried to live up to in his private life--tried in vain. With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, no doubt, was whimsical enough, and yet how many rich and rare passages in his writings are informed by a whim of a purely intellectual kind--a whim which could only have sprung from that delicious literary mood of his, engendered by much study of quaint old writers, into which he passed when at his desk! But whatsoever is whimsical, whatsoever is eccentric and angular, in Borrow's writings is the natural, the inevitable growth of a nature more whimsical, more eccentric, more angular still.

That such a man should have had an extraordinary life-experience was to be expected. And an extraordinary life-experience Borrow's was, to be sure! This alone would lend an especial interest to Borrow's biography--the fact, we mean, of his life having been extraordinary. For in these days no lives, as a rule, are less adventurous, none, as a rule, less tinged with romance, than the lives of those who attain eminence in the world of letters. No doubt they nowadays move about from place to place a good deal; not a few of them may even be called travellers, or at least globe-trotters; but, alas! in globe-trotting who shall hope to meet with adventures of a more romantic kind than those connected with a railway collision or a storm at sea? And this was so in days that preceded ours. It was so with Scott, it was so with Dickens, it was so with even Dumas, who, chained to his desk for months and months at a stretch, could only be seen by his friends during the intervals of work. Nay, even with regard to the writing men of the far past, the more time a man gave to literary production the less time he had to drink the rich wine of life, to see the world, to study nature and nature's enigma man.

Perhaps one reason why we have almost no record of what the greatest of all writing men was doing in the world is that while his friends were elbowing the tide of life in the streets of London, or fighting in the Low Countries, or carousing at the Mermaid Tavern, or at the Apollo Saloon, he was filling every moment with work--work which enabled him, before he reached his fifty-second year, to build up that literary monument of his, that edifice which made the monuments of the others, his contemporaries, seem like the handiwork of pigmies. But as regards Borrow, student though he was, it is not as an author that we think of him; it is as the adventurer, it is as the great Romany Rye, who discovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brother vagabond lived with them--lived with them "on the accont of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature's life," to quote the "testimonial" of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell.

Even by his personal appearance Borrow was marked off from his fellow-men. As a gipsy girl once remarked, "Nobody as ever see'd the white-headed Romany Rye ever forgot him." Standing considerably above six feet in height, he was built as perfectly as a Greek statue, and his practice of athletic exercises gave his every movement the easy elasticity of an athlete under training. As to his countenance, "noble" is the only word that can be used to describe it. The silvery whiteness of the thick crop of hair seemed to add in a remarkable way to the beauty of the hairless face, but also it gave a strangeness to it, and this strangeness was intensified by a certain incongruity between the features and the Scandinavian complexion, luminous and sometimes rosy as an English girl's. An increased intensity was lent by the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes. What struck the observer, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man's appearance. It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it was the expression of the face as a whole. If it were possible to describe this expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shy self-consciousness.

How did it come about, then, that a man shy, self-conscious, and sensitive to the last degree, became the Ulysses of the writing fraternity, wandering among strangers all over Europe, and consorting on intimate terms with that race who, more than all others, are repelled by shy self-consciousness--the gipsies? This, perhaps, is how the puzzle may be explained. When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life there was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism. What Carlyle calls the "armed neutrality" of social intercourse oppressed him. He felt himself to be in the enemy's camp. In his eyes there was always a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutor and weighing him against himself. He seemed to be observing what effect his words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first. But the moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became another man. He threw off the burden of restraint. The feeling of the "armed neutrality" was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying the only social intercourse that could give him pleasure. This it was that enabled him to make friends so entirely with the gipsies. Notwithstanding what is called "Romany guile" , the basis of the Romany character is a joyous frankness. Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from the "Gorgio" be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romany temperament begins to show itself. The gipsies are extremely close observers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow's bearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his own race, and Borrow used to say that "old Mrs. Herne and Leonora were the only gipsies who suspected and disliked him."

Thus it came about that the gipsies and the wanderers generally were almost the only people in any country who saw the winsome side of Borrow. A truly winsome side he had. Yes, notwithstanding all that has been said about him to the contrary, Borrow was a most interesting and charming companion. We all have our angularities; we all have unpleasant facets of character when occasion offers for showing them. But there are some unfortunate people whose angularities are for ever chafing and irritating their friends. Borrow was one of these. It is very rarely indeed that one meets a friend or an acquaintance of Borrow's who speaks of him with the kindness he deserved. When a friend or an acquaintance relates an anecdote of him the asperity with which he does so is really remarkable and quite painful. It was--it must have been--far from Dr. Gordon Hake's wish to speak unkindly of his old friend who remained to the last deeply attached to him. And yet few things have done more to prejudice the public against Borrow than the Doctor's tale of Lavengro's outrage at Rougham Rookery, the residence of the banker Bevan, one of the kindest and most benevolent men in Suffolk.

This story, often told by Hake, appeared at last in print in his memoirs. Invited to dinner by Mr. Bevan, Borrow accepted the invitation and, according to the anecdote, thus behaved: During dinner Mrs. Bevan, thinking to please him, said, "Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books with so much pleasure!" On which Borrow exclaimed, "Pray what books do you mean, ma'am--do you mean my account books?" Then, rising from the table, he walked up and down among the servants during the whole dinner, and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passages till the carriage could be ordered for his return home. A monstrous proceeding truly, and not to be condoned by any circumstances. Yet some part of its violence may, perhaps, thus be explained. Borrow's loyalty to a friend was proverbial--until he and the friend quarrelled. A man who dared say an ungenerous word against a friend of Borrow's ran the risk of being knocked down. Borrow on this occasion had been driven half mad with rage--unreasoning, ignorant rage--against the Bury banking-house, because it had "struck the docket" against a friend of Borrow's, the heir to a considerable estate, who had got into difficulties. What Borrow yearned to do was, as he told the present writer, to cane the banker. He had, as far as his own reputation went, far better have done this and taken the consequences than have insulted the banker's wife--one of the most gentle, amiable, and unassuming ladies in Suffolk. Dr. Knapp speaks very sharply of Miss Cobb's remarks upon Borrow, and certainly these remarks are made with a great deal too much acidity. But if the Borrovian is to lose temper with every one who girds at Borrow he will lead a not very comfortable life.

All writers upon Borrow fall into the mistake of considering him to have been an East Anglian. They might as well call Charlotte Bront? a Yorkshirewoman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics. He inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of "leg of mutton and turnips." Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences him throughout his life. The fact of Borrow's having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow's father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow's ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the sublime egotism of Borrow--perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of human nature--that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.

There is, it must be confessed, something to us very agreeable in Dr. Knapp's single-minded hero-worship. A scholar and a philologist himself, he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Borrow--following in Lavengro's footsteps from one country to another with unflagging enthusiasm. Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worship runs to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow's writings are condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr. Knapp, while the most unanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented. For instance, at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman who read 'Zincali' for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, as though he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:--

Dr. Knapp says emphatically that Borrow never created a character, and that the originals are easily recognizable to one who thoroughly knows the times and Borrow's writings. This is true, no doubt, as regards people with whom he was brought into contact at Norwich, and, indeed, generally before the period of his gipsy wanderings. It must not be supposed, however, that such characters as the man who "touched" to avert the evil chance and the man who taught himself Chinese are in any sense portraits. They have so many of Borrow's own peculiarities that they might rather be called portraits of himself. There was nothing that Borrow strove against with more energy than the curious impulse, which he seems to have shared with Dr. Johnson, to touch the objects along his path in order to save himself from the evil chance. He never conquered the superstition. In walking through Richmond Park he would step out of his way constantly to touch a tree, and he was offended if the friend he was with seemed to observe it. Many of the peculiarities of the man who taught himself Chinese were also Borrow's own.

"But what about Isopel Berners?" the reader will ask. "How much of truth and how much of fiction went to the presentation of this most interesting character?" Seeing that Dr. Knapp has at his command such an immense amount of material in manuscript, the reader will feel some disappointment at discovering that the book tells us nothing new about her. The character he names Isopel Berners was just the sort of girl in every way to attract Borrow, and if he had had the feeblest spark of the love-passion in his constitution one could almost imagine his falling in love with her. Yet even the portrait of Isopel is marred by Borrow's impulse towards exaggeration. He must needs describe her as being taller than himself, and as he certainly stood six feet three Isopel would have been far better suited to sit by the side of Borrow's friend the "Norfolk giant," Hales, in the little London public-house where he latterly resided, than to become famous as a fighting woman who could conquer the Flaming Tinman. Few indeed have been the women who could stand up for long before a trained boxer, and these must needs be not too tall, and moreover they must have their breasts padded after the manner of a well-known gipsy girl who excelled in this once fashionable accomplishment. Even then a woman's instinct impels her to guard her chest more carefully than she guards her face, and this leads to disaster. Altogether Borrow, by his wilful exaggeration, makes the reader a little sceptical about Isopel, who was really an East Anglian road-girl of the finest type, known to the Boswells, and remembered not many years ago. All that Dr. Knapp has derived from the documents in his possession concerning her is the following extraordinary passage from the original manuscript, which Borrow struck out of 'Lavengro.' He says:--

"As to the remarkable character introduced into 'Lavengro' and 'Romany Rye' under the name of Isopel Berners, I have no light from the MSS. of George Borrow, save the following fragment, which perhaps I ought to have suppressed. I am sorry if it dispel any illusions:--

" 'My mind at present rather inclines towards two wives. I have heard that King Pharaoh had two, if not more. Now, I think myself as good a man as he; and if he had more wives than one, why should not I, whose name is Petulengro?'

"'But what would Mrs. Petulengro say?'

"'So much as far as my wife is concerned. As for myself, I tell you what, brother, I want a strapper; one who can give and take. The Flying Tinker is abroad, vowing vengeance against us all. I know what the Flying Tinker is, so does Tawno. The Flying Tinker came to our camp. "Damn you all," says he, "I'll fight the best of you for nothing."--"Done!" says Tawno, "I'll be ready for you in a minute." So Tawno went into his tent and came out naked. "Here's at you," says Tawno. Brother, Tawno fought for two hours with the Flying Tinker, for two whole hours, and it's hard to say which had the best of it or the worst. I tell you what, brother, I think Tawno had the worst of it. Night came on. Tawno went into his tent to dress himself and the Flying Tinker went his way.

Why did Borrow reject this passage? Was it owing to his dread of respectability's frowns?--or was it not rather because he felt that here his exaggeration, his departure from the true in quest of the striking, did not recommend itself to his cooler judgment? For those who know anything of the gipsies would say at once that it would have been impossible for Mrs. Petulengro to make this suggestion; and that, even if she had made it, Mr. Petulengro would not have dared to broach it to any English road-girl, least of all to a girl like Isopel Berners. The passage, however, is the most interesting document that Dr. Knapp has published.

What may be called the Isopel Berners chapter of Borrow's life was soon to be followed by the "veiled period"--that is to say, the period between the point where ends 'The Romany Rye' and the point where the Bible Society engages Borrow.

Dr. Knapp's mind seems a good deal exercised concerning this period. Borrow having chosen to draw the veil over that period, no one has any right to raise it--or, rather, perhaps no one would have had any right to do so had not Borrow himself thrown such a needless mystery around it. In considering any matter in connexion with Borrow it is always necessary to take into account the secretiveness of his disposition, and also his passion for posing. He had a child's fondness for the wonderful. It is through his own love of mystification that students like Dr. Knapp must needs pry into these matters--must needs ask why Borrow drew the veil over seven years--must needs ask whether during the "veiled period" he led a life of squalid misery, compared with which his sojourn with Isopel Berners in Mumpers' Dingle was luxury, or whether he was really travelling, as he pretended to have been, over the world.

With regard to this veiled period, people who read the idyllic pictures in 'Lavengro' and 'The Romany Rye' of the life of a gipsy gentleman working as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forget that Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and they forget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought for the odd sixpence or the few coppers that he was able to earn. To those, however, who do not forget this it needs no revelation from documents, and none from any surviving friend, to come to the conclusion that as Borrow was mainly living in England during these seven years , his life was during this period one of privation, disappointment, and gloom. It was for him to decide what he would give to the public and what he would withhold.

The concluding chapter of Dr. Knapp's book is not only pathetic--it is painful. In the summer of 1874 Borrow left London, bade adieu to Mr. Murray and a few friends, and returned to Oulton--to die. On the 26th of July, 1881, he was found dead in his home at Oulton, in his seventy-ninth year.

At Birchington-on-Sea one of the most rarely gifted men of our time has just died after a lingering illness. During the time that his 'Ballads and Sonnets' was passing through the press last autumn his health began to give way, and he left London for Cumberland. A stay of a few weeks in the Vale of St. John, however, did nothing to improve his health, and he returned much shattered. After a time a numbness in the left arm excited fear of paralysis, and he became dangerously ill. It is probable, indeed, that nothing but the skill and unwearied attention of Mr. John Marshall saved his life then, as it had done upon several previous occasions. Such of his friends as were then in London--W. B. Scott, Burne Jones, Leyland, F. Shields, Mr. Dunn, and others--feeling the greatest alarm, showed him every affectionate attention, and spared no effort to preserve a life so precious and so beloved. Mr. Seddon having placed at his disposal West Cliff Bungalow, Birchington-on-Sea, he went thither, accompanied by his mother and sister and Mr. Hall Caine, about nine weeks since, but received no benefit from the change, and, gradually sinking from a complication of disorders, he died on Sunday last at 10 P.M.

Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti's gifts as a poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and at this moment. That the quality of romantic imagination informs with more vitality his work than it can be said to inform the work of any of his contemporaries was recognized at first by the few, and is now being recognized by the many. And the same, I think, may be said of his painting. Those who had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how "of imagination all compact" he was. Imagination, indeed, was at once his blessing and his bane. To see too vividly--to love too intensely--to suffer and enjoy too acutely--is the doom, no doubt, of all those "lost wanderers from Arden" who, according to the Rosicrucian story, sing the world's songs; and to Rossetti this applies more, perhaps, than to most poets. And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry which really gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth is neither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but the clearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination--the very qualities, in short, for which such poems as 'Sister Helen' and 'Rose Mary' are so conspicuous--we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti's poetry has a long and enduring future before it.

Young Rossetti was first sent to the private school of the Rev. Mr. Paul in Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, for only three quarters of a year, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836. He next went to King's College School in the autumn of 1836, where he remained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class, then conducted by the Rev. Mr. Framley.

Having from early childhood shown a strong propensity for drawing and painting, which had thus been always regarded as his future profession, he now left school for ever and received no more school learning. In Latin he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well; he had spoken Italian from childhood, and had some German lessons about 1844-5. On leaving school he went at once to the Art Academy of Cary near Bedford Square, and thence obtained admission to the Royal Academy Antique School in 1844 or 1845. To the Royal Academy Life School he never went, and he was a somewhat negligent art student, but always regarded as one who had a future before him.

In 1849 Rossetti exhibited 'The Girlhood of the Virgin' in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti's early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no proper function. Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designing faculty displayed by Madox Brown's cartoons exhibited in Westminster Hall. When Rossetti began serious work as a painter he thought of Madox Brown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practical guidance, and wrote to him at random. From this time Madox Brown became his intimate friend and artistic monitor.

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