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 emigré, 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. Dæta, 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. 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 Müller; 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 mediæval 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 Athenæum 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 raisonné 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 éclat, 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 Athenæum. The varied contents of Lavengro are here easily reduced to one denomination—’balderdash,’ for the emission of which the Athenæum 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 Émile Montégut 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 Bohémien” (an essay which appears in his Ecrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre, between studies on “Mistress Browning” and Alfred Tennyson), Montégut 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 novéla 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 Fouqué, 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 mémoire, est de n’avoir pas fait des journaux de mes voyages. Jamais je n’ai tant pensé, tant existé, tant vécu, tant été moi, si j’ose ainsi dire, que dans ceux que j’ai faits seul et à pied. La marche a quelque chose qui anime et avive mes idées: 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 agréables, le grand air, le grand appétit, la bonne sante que je gagne en marchant, la liberté du cabaret, l’éloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dépendance, de tout ce qui me rappelle à ma situation: tout cela dégage mon âme.”

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 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. 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 Jerôme 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 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.

CHAPTER II—THE SHOEING OF AMBROL.

It has always struck me that there is something highly poetical about a forge. I am not singular in this opinion: various individuals have assured me that they never pass by one, even in the midst of a crowded town, without experiencing sensations which they can scarcely define, but which are highly pleasurable. I have a decided penchant for forges, especially rural ones placed in some quaint quiet spot—a dingle, for example, which is a poetical place, or at a meeting of four roads, which is still more so; for how many a superstition—and superstition is the soul of poetry—is connected with these cross roads! I love to light upon such a one, especially after nightfall, as everything about

a forge tells to most advantage at night; the hammer sounds more solemnly in the stillness, the glowing particles scattered by the stroke sparkle with more effect in the darkness, whilst the sooty visage of the sastramescro, [{65a}] half in shadow, and half illumined by the red and partial blaze of the forge, looks more mysterious and strange. On such occasions I draw in my horse’s rein, and, seated in the saddle, endeavour to associate with the picture before me—in itself a picture of romance—whatever of the wild and wonderful I have read of in books, or have seen with mine own eyes in connection with forges.

I believe the life of any blacksmith, especially a rural one, would afford materials for a highly poetical history. I do not speak unadvisedly, having the honour to be free of the forge, and therefore fully competent to give an opinion as to what might be made out of the forge by some dextrous hand. Certainly, the strangest and most entertaining life ever written is that of a blacksmith of the olden north, a certain Volundr, or Velint, [{65b}] who lived in woods and thickets, made keen swords,—so keen, indeed, that if placed by a running stream, they would fairly divide an object, however slight, which was borne against them by the water—and who eventually married a king’s daughter, by whom he had a son, who was as bold a knight as his father was a cunning blacksmith. I never see a forge at night, when seated on the back of my horse at the bottom of a dark lane, but I somehow or other associate it

with the exploits of this extraordinary fellow, with many other extraordinary things, amongst which, as I have hinted before, are particular passages of my own life, one or two of which I shall perhaps relate to the reader.

I never associate Vulcan and his Cyclops with the idea of a forge. These gentry would be the very last people in the world to flit across my mind whilst gazing at the forge from the bottom of the dark lane. The truth is, they are highly unpoetical fellows, as well they may be, connected as they are with Grecian mythology. At the very mention of their names the forge burns dull and dim, as if snowballs had been suddenly flung into it; the only remedy is to ply the bellows, an operation which I now hasten to perform.

I am in the dingle making a horseshoe. Having no other horses on whose hoofs I could exercise my art, I made my first essay on those of my own horse, if that could be called horse which horse was none, being only a pony. Perhaps if I had sought all England I should scarcely have found an animal more in need of the kind offices of the smith. On three of his feet there were no shoes at all, and on the fourth only a remnant of one, on which account his hoofs were sadly broken and lacerated by his late journeys over the hard and flinty roads. “You belonged to a tinker before,” said I, addressing the animal, “but now you belong to a smith. It is said that the household of the shoemaker invariably go worse shod than that of any other craft. That may be the case of those who make shoes of leather, but it shan’t be said of the

household of him who makes shoes of iron; at any rate, it shan’t be said of mine. I tell you what, my gry, [{67a}] whilst you continue with me, you shall both be better shod, and better fed, than you were with your late master.”

I am in the dingle making a petul; [{67b}] and I must here observe, that whilst I am making a horseshoe, the reader need not be surprised if I speak occasionally in the language of the lord of the horseshoe—Mr. Petulengro. I have for some time past been plying the peshota, or bellows, endeavouring to raise up the yag, or fire, in my primitive forge. The angar, or coals, are now burning fiercely, casting forth sparks and long vagescoe chipes, or tongues of flame; a small bar of sastra, or iron, is lying in the fire, to the length of ten or twelve inches, and so far it is hot, very hot, exceeding hot, brother. And now you see me prala, snatch the bar of iron, and place the heated end of it upon the covantza, or anvil, and forthwith I commence cooring [{67c}] the sastra as hard as if I had been just engaged by a master at the rate of dui caulor, or two shillings a day, brother; and when I have beaten the iron till it is nearly cool, and my arm tired, I place it again in the angar, and begin again to rouse the fire with the pudomengro, which signifies the blowing thing, and is another and more common word for bellows, and whilst thus employed I sing a gypsy song, the sound of which is wonderfully in unison with the hoarse moaning of the pudamengro, and ere the song is finished, the iron is again hot and malleable. Behold,

I place it once more on the covantza, and recommence hammering; and now I am somewhat at fault: I am in want of assistance; I want you, brother, or some one else, to take the bar out of my hand and support it upon the covantza, whilst I, applying a chinomescro, or kind of chisel, to the heated iron, cut off with a lusty stroke or two of the shukaro baro, or big hammer, as much as is required for the petul. But having no one to help me, I go on hammering till I have fairly knocked off as much as I want, and then I place the piece in the fire, and again apply the bellows, and take up the song where I left it off; and when I have finished the song, I take out the iron, but this time with my plaistra, or pincers, and then I recommence hammering, turning the iron round and round with my pincers: and now I bend the iron, and lo, and behold, it has assumed something the outline of a petul.

I am not going to enter into farther details with respect to the process—it was rather a wearisome one. I had to contend with various disadvantages: my forge was a rude one, my tools might have been better; I was in want of one or two highly necessary implements, but, above all, manual dexterity. Though free of the forge, I had not practised the albeytarian art for very many years, never since—but stay, it is not my intention to tell the reader, at least in this place, how and when I became a blacksmith. There was one thing, however, which stood me in good stead in my labour, the same thing which through life has ever been of incalculable utility to me, and has not unfrequently supplied the

place of friends, money, and many other things of almost equal importance—iron perseverance, without which all the advantages of time and circumstances are of very little avail in any undertaking. I was determined to make a horseshoe, and a good one, in spite of every obstacle—ay, in spite o’ dukkerin. At the end of four days, during which I had fashioned and re-fashioned the thing at least fifty times, I had made a petul such as no master of the craft need have been ashamed of; with the second shoe I had less difficulty, and, by the time I had made the fourth, I would have scorned to take off my hat to the best smith in Cheshire.

But I had not yet shod my little gry; [{69a}] this I proceeded now to do. After having first well pared the hoofs with my churi, [{69b}] I applied each petul hot, glowing hot to the pindro. [{69c}] Oh, how the hoofs hissed; and, oh, the pleasant pungent odour which diffused itself through the dingle, an odour good for an ailing spirit!

I shoed the little horse bravely—merely pricked him once, slightly with a cafi, [{69d}] for doing which, I remember, he kicked me down; I was not disconcerted, however, but, getting up, promised to be more cautious in future; and having finished the operation, I filed the hoof well with the rin baro; [{69e}] then dismissed him to graze amongst the trees, and, putting my smaller tools into the muchtar, [{69f}] I sat down on my stone, and, supporting my arm upon my knee, leaned my head upon my hand. Heaviness had come over me.

CHAPTER III—THE DARK HOUR COMES UPON LAVENGRO AND HIS SOUL IS HEAVY WITHIN HIM.

Heaviness had suddenly come over me, heaviness of heart, and of body also. I had accomplished the task which I had imposed upon myself, and now that nothing more remained to do, my energies suddenly deserted me, and I felt without strength and without hope. Several causes, perhaps, co-operated to bring about the state in which I then felt myself. It is not improbable that my energies had been overstrained during the work, the progress of which I have attempted to describe; and everyone is aware that the results of overstrained energies are feebleness and lassitude—want of nourishment might likewise have something to do with it. During my sojourn in the dingle, my food had been of the simplest and most unsatisfying description, by no means calculated to support the exertion which the labour I had been engaged upon required; it had consisted of coarse oaten cakes and hard cheese, and for beverage I had been indebted to a neighbouring pit, in which, in the heat of the day, I frequently saw, not golden or silver fish, but frogs and eftes swimming about. I am, however, inclined to believe that Mrs. Herne’s cake had quite as much to do with the matter as insufficient nourishment. I had never entirely recovered from the effects of its poison, but had occasionally, especially at night, been visited by

a grinding pain in the stomach, and my whole body had been suffused with cold sweat; and indeed these memorials of the drow [{71}] have never entirely disappeared—even at the present time they display themselves in my system, especially after much fatigue of body and excitement of mind. So there I sat in the dingle upon my stone, nerveless and hopeless, by whatever cause or causes that state had been produced—there I sat with my head leaning upon my hand, and so I continued a long, long time. At last I lifted my head from my hand, and began to cast anxious, unquiet looks about the dingle—the entire hollow was now enveloped in deep shade—I cast my eyes up; there was a golden gleam on the tops of the trees which grew towards the upper parts of the dingle; but lower down, all was gloom and twilight—yet, when I first sat down on my stone, the sun was right above the dingle, illuminating all its depths by the rays which it cast perpendicularly down—so I must have sat a long, long time upon my stone. And now, once more, I rested my head upon my hand, but almost instantly lifted it again in a kind of fear, and began looking at the objects before me—the forge, the tools, the branches of the trees, endeavouring to follow their rows, till they were lost in the darkness of the dingle. And now I found my right hand grasping convulsively three forefingers of the left, first collectively, and then successively, wringing them till the joints cracked; then I became quiet, but not for long.

Suddenly I started up, and could scarcely repress

the shriek which was rising to my lips. Was it possible? Yes, all too certain: the evil one was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt in my boyhood had once more taken possession of me. I had thought that it had forsaken me; that it would never visit me again; that I had outgrown it; that I might almost bid defiance to it; and I had even begun to think of it without horror, as we are in the habit of doing of horrors of which we conceive we run no danger; and lo! when least thought of, it had seized me again. Every moment I felt it gathering force, and making me more wholly its own. What should I do?—resist, of course; and I did resist. I grasped, I tore, and strove to fling it from me; but of what avail were my efforts? I could only have got rid of it by getting rid of myself: it was a part of myself, or rather it was all myself. I rushed amongst the trees, and struck at them with my bare fists, and dashed my head against them, but I felt no pain. How could I feel pain with that horror upon me! and then I flung myself on the ground, gnawed the earth, and swallowed it; and then I looked round: it was almost total darkness in the dingle, and the darkness added to my horror. I could no longer stay there; up I rose from the ground, and attempted to escape; at the bottom of the winding path which led up the acclivity I fell over something which was lying on the ground; the something moved, and gave a kind of whine. It was my little horse, which had made that place its lair—my little horse, my only companion

and friend, in that now awful solitude. I reached the mouth of the dingle; the sun was just sinking in the far west, behind me; the fields were flooded with his last gleams. How beautiful everything looked in the last gleams of the sun! I felt relieved for a moment; I was no longer in the horrid dingle; in another minute the sun was gone, and a big cloud occupied the place where he had been; in a little time it was almost as dark as it had previously been in the open part of the dingle. My horror increased; what was I to do!—it was of no use fighting against the horror—that I saw; the more I fought against it, the stronger it became. What should I do? say my prayers? Ah! why not? So I knelt down under the hedge, and said, “Our Father”; but that was of no use; and now I could no longer repress cries; the horror was too great to be borne. What should I do: run to the nearest town or village, and request the assistance of my fellow-men? No! that I was ashamed to do; notwithstanding the horror was upon me, I was ashamed to do that. I knew they would consider me a maniac if I went screaming amongst them; and I did not wish to be considered a maniac. Moreover, I knew that I was not a maniac for I possessed all my reasoning powers, only the horror was upon me—the screaming horror! But how were indifferent people to distinguish between madness and this screaming horror? So I thought and reasoned; and at last I determined not to go amongst my fellow-men, whatever the result might be. I went to the mouth of the dingle,

and there, placing myself on my knees, I again said the Lord’s Prayer; but it was of no use; praying seemed to have no effect over the horror; the unutterable fear appeared rather to increase than diminish; and I again uttered wild cries, so loud that I was apprehensive they would be heard by some chance passenger on the neighbouring road; I, therefore, went deeper into the dingle; I sat down with my back against a thorn bush; the thorns entered my flesh; and when I felt them, I pressed harder against the bush; I thought the pain of the flesh might in some degree counteract the mental agony; presently I felt them no longer; the power of the mental horror was so great that it was impossible, with that upon me, to feel any pain from the thorns. I continued in this posture a long time, undergoing what I cannot describe, and would not attempt if I were able. Several times I was on the point of starting up and rushing anywhere; but I restrained myself, for I knew I could not escape from myself, so why should I not remain in the dingle? So I thought and said to myself, for my reasoning powers were still uninjured. At last it appeared to me that the horror was not so strong, not quite so strong upon me. Was it possible that it was relaxing its grasp, releasing its prey? O what a mercy! but it could not be—and yet I looked up to heaven, and clasped my hands, and said, “Our Father.” I said no more; I was too agitated; and now I was almost sure that the horror had done its worst.

After a little time I arose, and staggered down yet

farther into the dingle. I again found my little horse on the same spot as before. I put my hand to his mouth; he licked my hand. I flung myself down by him and put my arms round his neck; the creature whinnied, and appeared to sympathize with me; what a comfort to have any one, even a dumb brute, to sympathize with me at such a moment! I clung to my little horse, as if for safety and protection. I laid my head on his neck, and felt almost calm; presently the fear returned, but not so wild as before; it subsided, came again, again subsided; then drowsiness came over me, and at last I fell asleep, my head supported on the neck of the little horse. I awoke; it was dark, dark night—not a star was to be seen—but I felt no fear, the horror had left me. I arose from the side of the little horse, and went into my tent, lay down, and again went to sleep.

I awoke in the morning weak and sore, and shuddering at the remembrance of what I had gone through on the preceding day. The sun was shining brightly, but it had not yet risen high enough to show its head above the trees which fenced the eastern side of the dingle, on which account the dingle was wet and dank, from the dews of the night. I kindled my fire, and, after sitting by it for some time to warm my frame, I took some of the coarse food which I have already mentioned; notwithstanding my late struggle, and the coarseness of the fare, I ate with appetite. My provisions had by this time been very much diminished, and I saw that it would be speedily

necessary, in the event of my continuing to reside in the dingle, to lay in a fresh store. After my meal I went to the pit, and filled a can with water, which I brought to the dingle, and then again sat down on my stone. I considered what I should next do: it was necessary to do something, or my life in this solitude would be unsupportable. What should I do? rouse up my forge and fashion a horseshoe; but I wanted nerve and heart for such an employment; moreover, I had no motive for fatiguing myself in this manner; my own horse was shod, no other was at hand, and it is hard to work for the sake of working. What should I do? read? Yes, but I had no other book than the Bible which the Welsh Methodist had given me: well, why not read the Bible? I was once fond of reading the Bible; ay, but those days were long gone by. However, I did not see what else I could do on the present occasion—so I determined to read the Bible—it was in Welsh; at any rate it might amuse me, so I took the Bible out of the sack, in which it was lying in the cart, and began to read at the place where I chanced to open it. I opened it at the part where the history of Saul commences. At first I read with indifference, but after some time my attention was riveted. And no wonder: I had come to the visitations of Saul, those dark moments of his, when he did and said such unaccountable things; it almost appeared to me that I was reading of myself; I, too, had my visitations, dark as ever his were. O, how I sympathized with Saul, the tall dark man! I had read his life

before, but it had made no impression on me; it had never occurred to me that I was like him, but I now sympathized with Saul, for my own dark hour was but recently passed, and, perhaps, would soon return again; the dark hour came frequently on Saul.

Time wore away; I finished the book of Saul, and, closing the volume, returned it to its place. I then returned to my seat on the stone, and thought of what I had read, and what I had lately undergone. All at once I thought I felt well-known sensations—a cramping of the breast, and a tingling of the soles of the feet—they were what I had felt on the preceding day; they were the forerunners of the fear. I sat motionless on my stone; the sensations passed away, and the fear came not. Darkness was now coming again over the earth; the dingle was again in deep shade. I roused the fire with the breath of the bellows, and sat looking at the cheerful glow; it was cheering and comforting. My little horse came now and lay down on the ground beside the forge; I was not quite deserted. I again ate some of the coarse food, and drank plentifully of the water which I had fetched in the morning. I then put fresh fuel on the fire, and sat for a long time looking on the blaze; I then went into my tent.

I awoke, on my own calculation, about midnight—it was pitch dark, and there was much fear upon me.

CHAPTER IV.—A CLASSICAL ENCOUNTER—LONG MELFORD TO THE RESCUE.

Two mornings after the period to which I have brought the reader in the preceding chapter, I sat by my fire at the bottom of the dingle. I had just breakfasted, and had finished the last morsel of food which I had brought with me to that solitude.

“What shall I now do?” said I to myself: “shall I continue here, or decamp? This is a sad lonely spot—perhaps I had better quit it; but whither should I go? the wide world is before me, but what can I do therein? I have been in the world already without much success. No, I had better remain here; the place is lonely, it is true, but here I am free and independent, and can do what I please; but I can’t remain here without food. Well, I will find my way to the nearest town, lay in a fresh supply of provision, and come back, turning my back upon the world, which has turned its back upon me. I don’t see why I should not write a little sometimes; I have pens and an ink-horn, and for a writing-desk I can place the Bible on my knee. I shouldn’t wonder if I could write a capital satire on the world on the back of that Bible; but first of all I must think of supplying myself with food.”

I rose up from the stone on which I was seated, determining to go to the nearest town, with my little horse and cart and procure what I wanted. The nearest

town, according to my best calculation, lay about five miles distant; I had no doubt, however, that by using ordinary diligence, I should be back before evening. In order to go lighter, I determined to leave my tent standing as it was, and all the things which I had purchased of the tinker, just as they were. “I need not be apprehensive on their account,” said I to myself; “nobody will come here to meddle with them—the great recommendation of this place is its perfect solitude—I dare say that I could live here six months without seeing a single human visage. I will now harness my little gry and be off to the town.”

At a whistle which I gave, the little gry, which was feeding on the bank near the uppermost part of the dingle, came running to me, for by this time he had become so accustomed to me that he would obey my call for all the world as if he had been one of the canine species. “Now,” said I to him, “we are going to the town to buy bread for myself, and oats for you—I am in a hurry to be back; therefore, I pray you to do your best, and to draw me and the cart to the town with all possible speed, and to bring us back; if you do your best, I promise you oats on your return. You know the meaning of oats, Ambrol?”

Ambrol whinnied as if to let me know that he understood me perfectly well, as indeed he well might, as I had never once fed him during the time he had been in my possession without saying the word in question to him. Now, Ambrol, in the Gypsy tongue, signifieth a pear.

So I caparisoned Ambrol, and then, going to the cart, removed two or three things from out it into the tent; I then lifted up the shafts, and was just going to call to the pony to come and be fastened to them, when I thought I heard a noise.

I stood stock still, supporting the shaft of the little cart in my hand, and bending the right side of my face slightly towards the ground; but I could hear nothing. The noise which I thought I had heard was not one of those sounds which I was accustomed to hear in that solitude—the note of a bird, or the rustling of a bough; it was—there I heard it again—a sound very much resembling the grating of a wheel amongst gravel. Could it proceed from the road? Oh no, the road was too far distant for me to hear the noise of anything moving along it. Again I listened, and now I distinctly heard the sound of wheels, which seemed to be approaching the dingle; nearer and nearer they drew, and presently the sound of wheels was blended with the murmur of voices. Anon I heard a boisterous shout, which seemed to proceed from the entrance of the dingle. “Here are folks at hand,” said I, letting the shaft of the cart fall to the ground: “is it possible that they can be coming here?”

My doubts on that point, if I entertained any, were soon dispelled: the wheels, which had ceased moving for a moment or two, were once again in motion, and were now evidently moving down the winding path which led to my retreat. Leaving my cart, I came forward and placed myself near the entrance of the

open space, with my eyes fixed on the path down which my unexpected and I may say unwelcome visitors were coming. Presently I heard a stamping or sliding, as if of a horse in some difficulty; and then a loud curse, and the next moment appeared a man and a horse and cart; the former holding the head of the horse up to prevent him from falling, of which he was in danger, owing to the precipitous nature of the path. Whilst thus occupied, the head of the man was averted from me. When, however, he had reached the bottom of the descent, he turned his head, and perceiving me, as I stood bareheaded, without either coat or waistcoat, about two yards from him, he gave a sudden start, so violent that the backward motion of his hand had nearly flung the horse upon his haunches.

“Why don’t you move forward?” said a voice from behind, apparently that of a female; “you are stopping up the way, and we shall be all down upon one another;” and I saw the head of another horse overtopping the back of the cart.

“Why don’t you move forward, Jack?” said another voice, also of a female, yet higher up the path.

The man stirred not, but remained staring at me in the posture which he had assumed on first perceiving me, his body very much drawn back, his left foot far in advance of his right, and with his right hand still grasping the halter of the horse, which gave way more and more, till it was clean down on its haunches.

“What’s the matter?” said the voice which I had last heard.

“Get back with you, Belle, Moll,” said the man, still staring at me: “here’s something not over-canny or comfortable here.”

“What is it?” said the same voice; “let me pass, Moll, and I’ll soon clear the way,” and I heard a kind of rushing down the path.

“You need not be afraid,” said I, addressing myself to the man,—“I mean you no harm; I am a wanderer like yourself—-come here to seek for shelter—you need not be afraid; I am a Rome chabo [{82}] by matriculation—one of the right sort, and no mistake. Good day to ye, brother; I bids ye welcome.”

The man eyed me suspiciously for a moment—then, turning to his horse with a loud curse, he pulled him up from his haunches, and led him and the cart farther down to one side of the dingle, muttering as he passed me, “Afraid? Hm!”

I do not remember ever to have seen a more ruffianly-looking fellow: he was about six feet high, with an immensely athletic frame; his face was black and bluff, and sported an immense pair of whiskers, but with here and there a grey hair, for his age could not be much under fifty. He wore a faded blue frock coat, corduroys, and highlows—on his black head was a kind of red nightcap, round his bull neck a Barcelona handkerchief—I did not like the look of the man at all.

“Afraid,” growled the fellow, proceeding to unharness his horse; “that was the word, I think.”

But other figures were now already upon the scene. Dashing past the other horse and cart, which by this

time had reached the bottom of the pass, appeared an exceedingly tall woman, or rather girl, for she could scarcely have been above eighteen; she was dressed in a tight bodice, and a blue stuff gown; hat, bonnet or cap she had none, and her hair, which was flaxen, hung down on her shoulders unconfined; her complexion was fair, and her features handsome, with a determined but open expression. She was followed by another female, about forty, stout and vulgar-looking, at whom I scarcely glanced, my whole attention being absorbed by the tall girl.

“What’s the matter, Jack?” said the latter, looking at the man.

“Only afraid, that’s all,” said the man, still proceeding with his work.

“Afraid at what?—at that lad? Why, he looks like a ghost—I would engage to thrash him with one hand.”

“You might beat me with no hands at all,” said I, “fair damsel, only by looking at me: I never saw such a face and figure, both regal—why, you look like Ingeborg, Queen of Norway; she had twelve brothers, you know, and could lick them all, though they were heroes—

“‘On Dovrefeld in Norway,
Were once together seen,
The twelve heroic brothers
Of Ingeborg the queen.’”

“None of your chaffing, young fellow,” said the tall girl, “or I will give you what shall make you wipe your face; be civil, or you will rue it.”

“Well, perhaps I was a peg too high,” said I: “I ask your pardon—here’s something a bit lower—

“‘As I was jawing to the gav yeck divvus [{84a}]
I met on the drom miro Rommany chi—’” [{84b}]

“None of your Rommany chies, young fellow,” said the tall girl, looking more menacingly than before, and clenching her fist; “you had better be civil. I am none of your chies; and, though I keep company with gypsies or, to speak more proper, half and halfs, I would have you to know that I come of Christian blood and parents, and was born in the great house of Long Melford.”

“I have no doubt,” said I, “that it was a great house; judging from your size, I shouldn’t wonder if you were born in a church.”

“Stay, Belle,” said the man, putting himself before the young virago, who was about to rush upon me, “my turn is first.” Then, advancing to me in a menacing attitude, he said with a look of deep malignity, “‘Afraid’ was the word, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” said I, “but I think I wronged you; I should have said, aghast—you exhibited every symptom of one labouring under uncontrollable fear.”

The fellow stared at me with a look of stupid ferocity, and appeared to be hesitating whether to strike or not: ere he could make up his mind, the tall girl stepped forward, crying, “He’s chaffing; let me at him!” and, before I could put myself on my guard,

she struck me a blow on the face which had nearly brought me to the ground.

“Enough,” said I, putting my hand to my cheek; “you have now performed your promise, and made me wipe my face: now be pacified, and tell me fairly the ground of this quarrel.”

“Grounds!” said the fellow; “didn’t you say I was afraid? and if you hadn’t, who gave you leave to camp on my ground?”

“Is it your ground?” said I.

“A pretty question,” said the fellow; “as if all the world didn’t know that. Do you know who I am?”

“I guess I do,” said I; “unless I am much mistaken, you are he whom folks call the ‘Flaming Tinman.’ To tell you the truth, I’m glad we have met, for I wished to see you. These are your two wives, I suppose; I greet them. There’s no harm done—there’s room enough here for all of us—we shall soon be good friends, I dare say; and when we are a little better acquainted, I’ll tell you my history.”

“Well, if that doesn’t beat all!” said the fellow.

“I don’t think he’s chaffing now,” said the girl, whose anger seemed to have subsided on a sudden; “the young man speaks civil enough.”

“Civil!” said the fellow, with an oath; “but that’s just like you: with you it is a blow, and all over. Civil! I suppose you would have him stay here, and get into all my secrets, and hear all I may have to say to my two morts.”

“Two morts,” [{86}] said the girl, kindling up—“where are they? Speak for one, and no more. I am no mort of yours, whatever some one else may be. I tell you one thing, Black John, or Anselo, for t’other an’t your name, the same thing I told the young man here, be civil, or you will rue it.”

The fellow looked at the girl furiously, but his glance soon quailed before hers; he withdrew his eyes, and cast them on my little horse, which was feeding amongst the trees. “What’s this?” said he, rushing forward and seizing the animal. “Why, as I am alive, this is the horse of that mumping villain Slingsby.”

“It’s his no longer; I bought it and paid for it.”

“It’s mine now,” said the fellow; “I swore I would seize it the next time I found it on my beat—ay, and beat the master too.”

“I am not Slingsby.”

“All’s one for that.”

“You don’t say you will beat me?”

“Afraid was the word.”

“I’m sick and feeble.”

“Hold up your fists.”

“Won’t the horse satisfy you?”

“Horse nor bellows either.”

“No mercy, then.”

“Here’s at you.”

“Mind your eyes, Jack. There, you’ve got it. I thought so,” shouted the girl, as the fellow staggered

back from a sharp blow in the eye. “I thought he was chaffing at you all along.”

“Never mind, Anselo. You know what to do—go in,” said the vulgar woman, who had hitherto not spoken a word, but who now came forward with all the look of a fury; “go in, apopli; [{87}] you’ll smash ten like he.”

The Flaming Tinman took her advice, and came in bent on smashing, but stopped short on receiving a left-handed blow on the nose.

“You’ll never beat the Flaming Tinman in that way,” said the girl, looking at me doubtfully.

And so I began to think myself, when, in the twinkling of an eye, the Flaming Tinman disengaged himself of his frock-coat, and, dashing off his red nightcap, came rushing in more desperately than ever. To a flush hit which he received in the mouth he paid as little attention as a wild bull would have done; in a moment his arms were around me, and in another, he had hurled me down, falling heavily upon me. The fellow’s strength appeared to be tremendous.

“Pay him off now,” said the vulgar woman. The Flaming Tinman made no reply, but planting his knee on my breast, seized my throat with two huge horny hands. I gave myself up for dead, and probably should have been so in another minute but for the tall girl, who caught hold of the handkerchief which the fellow wore round his neck with a grasp nearly as powerful as that with which he pressed my throat.

“Do you call that fair play?” said she.

“Hands off, Belle,” said the other woman; “do you call it fair play to interfere? hands off, or I’ll be down upon you myself.”

But Belle paid no heed to the injunction, and tugged so hard at the handkerchief, that the Flaming Tinman was nearly throttled; suddenly relinquishing his hold of me, he started on his feet, and aimed a blow at my fair preserver, who avoided it, but said coolly:—

“Finish t’other business first, and then I’m your woman whenever you like; but finish it fairly—no foul play when I’m by—I’ll be the boy’s second, and Moll can pick you up when he happens to knock you down.”

The battle during the next ten minutes raged with considerable fury, but it so happened that during this time I was never able to knock the Flaming Tinman down, but on the contrary received six knock-down blows myself. “I can never stand this,” said I, as I sat on the knee of Belle: “I am afraid I must give in; the Flaming Tinman hits very hard,” and I spat out a mouthful of blood.

“Sure enough you’ll never beat the Flaming Tinman in the way you fight—it’s of no use flipping at the Flaming Tinman with your left hand: why don’t you use your right?”

“Because I’m not handy with it,” said I; and then getting up, I once more confronted the Flaming Tinman, and struck him six blows for his one, but they were all left-handed blows, and the blow which the Flaming Tinman gave me knocked me off my legs.

“Now, will you use Long Melford?” said Belle, picking me up.

“I don’t know what you mean by Long Melford,” said I, gasping for breath.

“Why, this long right of yours,” said Belle, feeling my right arm—“if you do, I shouldn’t wonder if you yet stand a chance.”

And now the Flaming Tinman was once more ready, much more ready than myself. I, however, rose from my second’s knee as well as my weakness would permit me; on he came striking left and right, appearing almost as fresh as to wind and spirit as when he first commenced the combat, though his eyes were considerably swelled, and his nether lip was cut in two; on he came, striking left and right, and I did not like his blows at all, or even the wind of them, which was anything but agreeable, and I gave way before him. At last he aimed a blow which, had it taken full effect, would doubtless have ended the battle, but, owing to his slipping, the fist only grazed my left shoulder, and came with terrific force against a tree, close to which I had been driven; before the Tinman could recover himself, I collected all my strength, and struck him beneath the ear, and then fell to the ground completely exhausted, and it so happened that the blow which I struck the Tinker beneath the ear was a right-handed blow.

“Hurrah for Long Melford!” I heard Belle exclaim; “there is nothing like Long Melford for shortness all the world over.”

At these words, I turned round my head as I lay, and perceived the Flaming Tinman stretched upon the ground apparently senseless. “He is dead,” said the vulgar woman, as she vainly endeavoured to raise him up; “he is dead; the best man in all the north country, killed in this fashion, by a boy.” Alarmed at these words, I made shift to get on my feet; and, with the assistance of the woman, placed my fallen adversary in a sitting posture. I put my hand to his heart, and felt a slight pulsation. “He’s not dead,” said I, “only stunned; if he were let blood, he would recover presently.” I produced a penknife which I had in my pocket, and, baring the arm of the Tinman, was about to make the necessary incision, when the woman gave me a violent blow, and, pushing me aside, exclaimed, “I’ll tear the eyes out of your head, if you offer to touch him. Do you want to complete your work, and murder him outright, now he’s asleep? you have had enough of his blood already.” “You are mad,” said I; “I only seek to do him service. Well, if you won’t let him be blooded, fetch some water and fling it into his face; you know where the pit is.”

“A pretty manœuvre,” said the woman: “leave my mard [{90a}] in the hands of you and that limmer, [{90b}] who has never been true to us: I should find him strangled or his throat cut when I came back.” “Do you go,” said I to the tall girl, “take the can and fetch some water from the pit.” “You had better go yourself,” said the girl, wiping a tear as she looked on the yet senseless

form of the tinker; “you had better go yourself, if you think water will do him good.” I had by this time somewhat recovered my exhausted powers, and, taking the can, I bent my steps as fast as I could to the pit; arriving there, I lay down on the brink, took a long draught, and then plunged my head into the water; after which I filled the can, and bent my way back to the dingle. Before I could reach the path which led down into its depths, I had to pass some way along its side; I had arrived at a part immediately over the scene of the last encounter, where the bank, overgrown with trees, sloped precipitously down. Here I heard a loud sound of voices in the dingle; I stopped, and laying hold of a tree, leaned over the bank and listened. The two women appeared to be in hot dispute in the dingle. “It was all owing to you, you limmer,” said the vulgar woman to the other; “had you not interfered, the old man would soon have settled the boy.”

“I’m for fair play and Long Melford,” said the other. “If yow old man, as you call him, could have settled the boy fairly, he might, for all I should have cared, but no foul work for me; and as for sticking the boy with our gulleys [{91}] when he comes back, as you proposed, I am not so fond of your old man or you that I should oblige you in it, to my soul’s destruction.” “Hold your tongue, or I’ll . . .”; I listened no farther, but hastened as fast as I could to the dingle. My adversary had just begun to show signs of animation;

the vulgar woman was still supporting him, and occasionally cast glances of anger at the tall girl, who was walking slowly up and down. I lost no time in dashing the greater part of the water into the Tinman’s face, whereupon he sneezed, moved his hands, and presently looked round him. At first his looks were dull and heavy, and without any intelligence at all; he soon, however, began to recollect himself, and to be conscious of his situation; he cast a scowling glance at me, then one of the deepest malignity at the tall girl, who was still walking about without taking much notice of what was going forward. At last he looked at his right hand, which had evidently suffered from the blow against the tree, and a half-stifled curse escaped his lips. The vulgar woman now said something to him in a low tone, whereupon he looked at her for a moment, and then got upon his legs. Again the vulgar woman said something to him; her looks were furious, and she appeared to be urging him on to attempt something. I observed that she had a clasped knife in her hand. The fellow remained standing for some time, as if hesitating what to do; at last he looked at his hand, and, shaking his head, said something to the woman which I did not understand. The tall girl, however, appeared to overhear him, and, probably repeating his words, said, “No, it won’t do: you are right there; and now hear what I have to say,—let bygones be bygones, and let us all shake hands, and camp here, as the young man was saying just now.” The man looked at her, and then, without any reply, went to his

horse, which was lying down among the trees, and kicking it up, led it to the cart, to which he forthwith began to harness it. The other cart and horse had remained standing motionless during the whole affair which I have been recounting, at the bottom of the pass. The woman now took the horse by the head, and leading it with the cart into the open part of the dingle, turned both round, and then led them back, till the horse and cart had mounted a little way up the ascent; she then stood still and appeared to be expecting the man. During this proceeding Belle had stood looking on without saying anything; at last, perceiving that the man had harnessed his horse to the other cart, and that both he and the woman were about to take their departure, she said, “You are not going, are you?” Receiving no answer, she continued: “I tell you what, both of you, Black John, and you Moll, his mort, this is not treating me over civilly,—however, I am ready to put up with it, and to go with you if you like, for I bear no malice. I’m sorry for what has happened, but you have only yourselves to thank for it. Now, shall I go with you? only tell me.” The man made no manner of reply, but flogged his horse. The woman, however, whose passions were probably under less control, replied, with a screeching tone, “Stay where you are, you jade, and may the curse of Judas cling to you,—stay with the bit of a mullo [{93a}] whom you helped, and my only hope is that he may gulley [{93b}] you before he comes to be—Have you with us, indeed! after what’s

past, no, nor nothing belonging to you. Fetch down your mailla [{94a}] go-cart and live here with your chabo.” [{94b}] She then whipped on the horse, and ascended the pass, followed by the man. The carts were light, and they were not long in ascending the winding path. I followed, to see that they took their departure. Arriving at the top, I found near the entrance a small donkey-cart, which I concluded belonged to the girl. The tinker and his mort were already at some distance; I stood looking after them for a little time, then taking the donkey by the reins I led it with the cart to the bottom of the dingle. Arrived there, I found Belle seated on the stone by the fireplace. Her hair was all dishevelled, and she was in tears.

“They were bad people,” said she, “and I did not like them, but they were my only acquaintance in the wide world.”

CHAPTER V.—ISOPEL BERNERS: A TALL GIRL OF EIGHTEEN, AND HER STORY.

In the evening of that same day the tall girl and I sat at tea by the fire, at the bottom of the dingle; the girl on a small stool, and myself, as usual, upon my stone.

The water which served for the tea had been taken from a spring of pellucid water in the neighbourhood, which I had not had the good fortune to discover, though it was well known to my companion, and to the wandering people who frequented the dingle.

“This tea is very good,” said I, “but I cannot enjoy it as much as if I were well: I feel very sadly.”

“How else should you feel,” said the girl, “after fighting with the Flaming Tinman? All I wonder is that you can feel at all! As for the tea, it ought to be good, seeing that it cost me ten shillings a pound.”

“That’s a great deal for a person in your station to pay.”

“In my station! I’d have you to know, young man—however, I haven’t the heart to quarrel with you, you look so ill; and after all, it is a good sum to pay for one who travels the roads; but if I must have tea, I like to have the best; and tea I must have, for I am used to it, though I can’t help thinking that it sometimes fills my head with strange fancies—what some folks call vapours, making me weep and cry!”

“Dear me,” said I, “I should never have thought that one of your size and fierceness would weep and cry!”

“My size and fierceness! I tell you what, young man, you are not over civil, this evening; but you are ill, as I said before, and I shan’t take much notice of your language, at least for the present; as for my size, I am not so much bigger than yourself; and as for being fierce, you should be the last one to fling that at me. It is well for you that I can be fierce sometimes. If I hadn’t taken your part against Blazing Bosville, you wouldn’t be now taking tea with me.”

“It is true that you struck me in the face first; but we’ll let that pass. So that man’s name is Bosville; what’s your own?”

“Isopel Berners.”

“How did you get that name?”

“I say, young man, you seem fond of asking questions! will you have another cup of tea?”

“I was just going to ask for another.”

“Well, then, here it is, and much good may it do you; as for my name, I got it from my mother.”

“Your mother’s name, then, was Isopel?”

“Isopel Berners.”

“But had you never a father?”

“Yes, I had a father,” said the girl, sighing, “but I don’t bear his name.”