chapter xvi. of _Lavengro_,
Borrow relates how in 1818, at Tombland Fair, Norwich, he doffed his hat
to the great trotting stallion, Marshland Shales, "drew a deep _ah_! and
repeated the words of the old fellows around, 'Such a horse as this we
shall never see again; a pity that he is so old.'" Yes, but as Professor
Knapp has found out, with his infinite painstaking, Marshland Shales
(1802-35) was not thus paraded until 12th April 1827.

_Lavengro_ {0a} was written in 1843-50, years after the events recorded
there. Several of its petty slips are probably due to sheer
forgetfulness; _e.g._, as to the four "airts" of Edinburgh Castle, and
the "lofty" town-walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed. And the rest, I imagine,
were due partly to love of posing, but much more to an honest desire to
produce an amusing and interesting book. Borrow was not writing a set
autobiography, and it seems rather hard to imagine that he was, and then
to come down on this or that inaccuracy. He did pose, though, all his
life long, and in every one of his writings. He posed to poor old Esther
Faa Blythe, the "queen" of the Yetholm Tinklers, when, on entering her
little cottage, he "flung his arms up three times into the air, and in an
exceedingly disagreeable voice exclaimed, '_Sossi your nav_?' etc."
(_Word-Book_, p. 314). He posed shamefully to Lieut.-Col. Elers Napier
(Knapp, i. 308-312); and he posed even to me, a mere lad, when I saw him
thrice in 1872-73, at Ascot, at his house in Hereford Square, and at the
Notting-hill Potteries (_Bookman_, Feb. 1893, pp. 147-48). Yet, what
books he has given us, the very best of them _Lavengro_; its fight with
the Flaming Tinman is the finest fight in all the world's literature.
_Lavengro_, nevertheless, met with a very sorry reception. It was not
genteel enough for the readers of Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton; and it is
only since Borrow's death, on 26th July 1881, that it has won its due
place of pre-eminence. "No man's writing," says Mr. Watts-Dunton, "can
take you into the country as Borrow's can; it makes you feel the
sunshine, smell the flowers, hear the lark sing and the grasshopper
chirp." They who would know Borrow thoroughly should pass from his own
works to Mr. Watts-Dunton's "Reminiscences of George Borrow" (_Athenaeum_,
Sept. 3, 10, 1881), to his "Notes upon George Borrow" (_Lavengro_, Ward,
Lock, Bowden, & Co., 1893), to Mr. William A. Dutt's _George Borrow in
East Anglia_ (1896), to Unpubli