es. He
buys a tinker's beat and fit-out from a feeble vessel of the craft, who
has been expelled by "the Flaming Tinman," a half-gipsy of robustious
behaviour. He is met by old Mrs. Hearne, the mother-in-law of his gipsy
friend Jasper Petulengro, who resents a Gorgio's initiation in gipsy
ways, and very nearly poisons him by the wily aid of her grand-daughter
Leonora. He recovers, thanks to a Welsh travelling preacher and to
castor oil. And then, when the Welshman has left him, comes the climax
and turning-point of the whole story, the great fight with Jem Bosvile,
"the Flaming Tinman." The much-abused adjective Homeric belongs in sober
strictness to this immortal battle, which has the additional interest
not thought of by Homer (for goddesses do not count) that Borrow's
second and guardian angel is a young woman of great attractions and
severe morality, Miss Isopel (or Belle) Berners, whose extraction,
allowing for the bar sinister, is honourable, and who, her hands being
fully able to keep her head, has sojourned without ill fortune in the
Flaming Tinman's very disreputable company. Bosvile, vanquished by pluck
and good fortune rather than strength, flees the place with his wife.
Isopel remains behind and the couple take up their joint residence, a
residence of perfect propriety, in this dingle, the exact locality of
which I have always longed to know, that I might make an autumnal
pilgrimage to it. Isopel, Brynhild as she is, would apparently have had
no objection to be honourably wooed. But her eccentric companion
confines himself to teaching her "I love" in Armenian, which she finds
unsatisfactory; and she at last departs, leaving a letter which tells
Mr. Borrow some home truths. And, even before this catastrophe has been
reached, _Lavengro_ itself ends with a more startling abruptness than
perhaps any nominally complete book before or since.

It would be a little interesting to know whether the continuation, _The
Romany Rye_, which opens as if there had been no break whatever, was
written continuously or with a break. At any rate its opening chapters
contain the finish of the lamentable history of Belle Berners, which
must induce every reader of sensibility to trust that Borrow, in writing
it, was only indulging in his very considerable faculty of perverse
romancing. The chief argument to the contrary is, that surely no man,
however imbued with romantic perversity, would have made himself cut so
poor a figure as B