fore. What I
believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a vocabulary, and a few loose
sketches, which he pitchforked together, but that the book itself was
made and cemented into one with additions for the first time after he
received my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. Sir
Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at Constantinople, Mr.
Borrow came there, and gave it out that he was a marvellous Oriental
scholar. But there was great scepticism on this subject at the Legation,
and one day at the _table-d'hote_, where the great writer and divers
young diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of Borrow
began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result being that he was
obliged to confess that he not only did not understand what they were
saying, but did not even know what the language was. Then he was tried
in Modern Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a
great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe it was far
more--like the African king, or the English prime minister, who, the
longer his shirts were made, insisted on having the higher collars, until
the former trailed on the ground and the latter rose above the top of his
head--"when they came home from the wash!"

What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it his faults or
failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigorous, marvellously
varied originality, based on direct familiarity with Nature, but guided
and cultured by the study of natural, simple writers, such as Defoe and
Smollett. I think that the "interest" in or rather sympathy for gypsies,
in his case as in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic
beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out-of-doors
Nature; so associated with sheltered nooks among rocks and trees, the
hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild roads. Borrow's heart was
large and true as regarded English rural life; there was a place in it
for everything which was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was
not a view-hunter of "bits," trained according to Ruskin and the
_deliberate_ word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian picturesque
poems; but he often brings us nearer to Nature than they do, not by
photography, but by casually letting fall a word or trait, by which we
realise not only her form but her soul. Herein he was like Washington
Irving, who gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply