26th, 1881, after years spent in a strange seclusion at Oulton, tended
latterly by his step-daughter Henrietta, George Borrow was found dead in
his bed, dying as he had lived, alone. Not long after his death, which
took place when he was seventy-eight, Borrow's Oulton home was pulled
down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the
old summer-house in which he wrote _Lavengro_, and the ragged fir-trees
that sighed the requiem of his last hours. Without appealing to "the
shires," but in the Eastern counties alone, he has been commemorated
since his death by such writers as Henry Dutt, and Whitwell Elwin, by
Egmont Hake, by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and by Dr. Jessopp. And now ere
the close of the century {40} it has fallen to the lot of yet another
East Anglian to place a small stone upon the cairn of George Borrow.

II.

The two books _Lavengro_ and _Romany Rye_ are in reality one work, an
unfinished autobiography, commenced upon a moderate and quite feasible
scale; but after about a third of the ground is covered the scale is
enormously increased, the narrative, encumbered by a vast amount of
detail, makes less and less progress, and finally stops short, without
any obvious, but rather a lame and impotent conclusion, at chapter xlvii.
of the _Romany Rye_, or chapter cxlvii. of the work considered as one
whole. The disproportion of the scale will be sufficiently indicated
when we point out that the first twenty-two years of the author's life
are treated pretty equally in fifty-seven chapters (i. to lvii.). The
remaining ninety chapters (lviii. to cxlvii.) are wholly taken up by the
incidents of less than four months, the four summer months of 1825. The
first twenty-two years of the author's life are far from commonplace. The
interest is well sustained, but is seldom intense,--at no point is the
author's memory sufficiently teeming to cause an overflow; but with the
conclusion of his sojourn in London, May 22nd, 1825, commences an
itinerant life, the novelty of which graves every incident in the most
vivid possible manner upon the writer's recollection. With his
emancipation from town life a new graphic impulse is developed. Borrow
seizes a new palette and sets to work with fresher colours upon a
stupendous canvas. This canvas may be described as taking the form of a
triptych. In the first compartment we have the first sensations of the
roadfarer's life and some minor adventures: a