hing that
Borrow ever wrote. The book falls off a little towards the close, which
is, if possible, even more abrupt and inconclusive than that of
"Lavengro" itself. In the appendix, the bigotries, hatreds, and
centrifugal propensities which made up the George Borrow of 1850-57 were
emphasized and underlined for the benefit of the flunkeys, vipers, and
"yahoos" who had dared to asperse his autobiography. He never carried
his story on from 1825 to 1832 or wrote the once projected "Bible in
Russia"; perhaps he never meant to do so; but, even if he had, we more
than doubt whether they would have approached in value the first 116
chapters of his immortal autobiography. His remaining work was the
detailed journal of a vacation tour in "Wild Wales," which was in no way
inferior to its predecessors in literary value, though it is considerably
below them in general interest. Wild people and old word-music, in its
"native wood-notes wild," were a passion with Borrow to the last, and
helped to save him from himself. He suffered terribly from horror of
death, religious gloom ("the horrors"), solitariness, and disappointment.
He experienced a series of rebuffs, failing in succession to obtain a
Consulship, a seat on the quorum, employment in China, and a
manuscript-hunting mission from the British Museum. His unrivalled
qualifications as a linguist failed to obtain for him posts for which he
was eminently fitted, but to which he saw inferior men preferred. If a
roving commission or an administrative post could have been found for him
abroad, by preference in the East as he himself desired, hard work might
have gone far to exorcise his melancholy, and 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 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, with brief intervals of solitary excursion in the "Celtic fringe"
or the Near East, Borrow remained glooming at home, working himself up
into a state of nervous excitement bordering upon dementia about a
neighbour's dog or a railway bisecting his wife's land. The gloom, of
course, was not chronic. There were days upon which he was himself
again, the old George Borrow. Generally speaking, his