imagination
are usually very irritable, very difficult to live with. Literary
history in its personal side is largely a dismal narrative of the
uncomfortable relations of men of genius with their wives and with their
families. Your man of genius thinks himself bound to hang up his fiddle
in his own house, however merry a fellow he may prove himself to a
hundred boon companions outside. George Borrow was perhaps the opposite
of all this. As a companion and a neighbour he did not always shine, if
the impression of many a witness is to be trusted. They tell anecdotes
of his lack of cordiality, of his unsociability, and so on. They have
told those anecdotes more industriously in Norwich than anywhere else. He
himself in an incomparable account of going to church with the gypsies in
_The Romany Rye_ has the following:

It appeared as if I had fallen asleep in the pew of the old church of
pretty Dereham. I had occasionally done so when a child, and had
suddenly woke up. Yes, surely, I had been asleep and had woke up; but
no! if I had been asleep I had been waking in my sleep, struggling,
striving, learning and unlearning in my sleep. Years had rolled away
whilst I had been asleep--ripe fruit had fallen, green fruit had come
on whilst I had been asleep--how circumstances had altered, and above
all myself whilst I had been asleep. No, I had not been asleep in the
old church! I was in a pew, it is true, but not the pew of black
leather, in which I sometimes fell asleep in days of yore, but in a
strange pew; and then my companions, they were no longer those of days
of yore. I was no longer with my respectable father and mother, and
my dear brother, but with the gypsy cral and his wife, and the
gigantic Tawno, the Antinous of the dusky people. And what was I
myself? No longer an innocent child but a moody man, bearing in my
face, as I knew well, the marks of my strivings and strugglings; of
what I had learnt and unlearnt.

But this "moody man," let it be always remembered, was a good husband and
father. His wife was devoted to him, his step-daughter carries now to an
old age a profound reverence and affection for his memory. Grieved
beyond all words was she--the Henrietta or "Hen" of all his books--at
what is maintained to be the utterly fictitious narrative of Borrow's
described deathbed that Professor Knapp presented from the ill-considered
gossip that he pick