or you
will see by the enclosed newspaper cutting that in Surrey a regular
trade is going on in caravans for gypsy gentlemen. And "Lavengro" and
"The Romany Rye" are going, I see, into lots of new editions. I know
how this must gratify you. But I write to ask you whether you have
seen the extremely bitter attack upon Borrow's memory which has
appeared in the _Daily Chronicle_. The writer is a man I must surely
have heard you mention with esteem--Dr. Jessopp. It is a review of
Murray's new edition of "The Romany Rye." In case you have not seen
it I send you a cutting from it for you to judge for yourself. {0a}

Was there ever anything so unjust as this? As to what he says about
Borrow's being without animal passion, I fancy that the writer must
have misread certain printed words of yours in which you say,
"Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn towards any woman,
could she possibly have been a Romany? would she not rather have been
of the Scandinavian type?" But I am quite sure that, when you said
this, you did not intend to suggest that he was "the Narses of
Literature." As to his dislike of children, I have heard you say how
interested he used to seem in the presence of gypsy children, and I
especially remember one anecdote of yours about the interest he took
in a child that he thought was being injured by the mother's smoking.
And did you not get that lovely anecdote about the gypsy child weeping
in the churchyard because the poor dead gorgios could not hear the
church chimes from something he told you? But I can speak from
personal experience about his feeling towards children that were not
gypsies. When our family lived at Bury St. Edmunds, in the fifties,
my father, as you know, was one of Borrow's most intimate friends, and
he was frequently at our house, and Borrow and my father were a good
deal in correspondence (as Dr. Knapp's book shows) and my impression
of Borrow is exactly the contrary of that which it would be if he in
the least resembled Dr. Jessopp's description of him. At that time
George was in the nursery and I was a child. He took a wonderfully
kind interest in us all; * * * * * * * * but the one he took most
notice of was George, chiefly because he was a very big, massive
child. It was then that he playfully christened him "Hales," because
he said that the child would develop