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