of Norwich. From Webber Dr. Knapp purchased the larger
portion, and, as his bibliography indicates (_Life_, vol. ii. pp.
355-88), he became possessed of sundry notebooks which furnish a record
of certain of Borrow's holiday tours, about a hundred letters from and
to Borrow, and a considerable number of other documents. The result, as
I have indicated, was a book that abounded in new facts and is rich in
new material. It was not, however, a book for popular reading. You must
love the subject before you turn to this book with any zest. It is a
book for your true Borrovian, who is thankful for any information about
the word-master, not for the casual reader, who might indeed be
alienated from the subject by this copious memoir. The result was
somewhat discouraging. There were not enough of true Borrovians in those
years, and the book was not received too generously. The two volumes
have gone out of print and have not reached a second edition. Time
however, will do them justice. As it is, your good Borrow lover has
always appreciated their merits. Take Lionel Johnson for example, a good
critic and a master of style. After saying that these 'lengthy and rich
volumes are a monument of love's labour, but not of literary art or
biographical skill,' he adds: 'Of his over eight hundred pages there is
not one for which I am not grateful' and every new biographer of Borrow
is bound to re-echo that sentiment. Dr. Knapp did the spade work and
other biographers have but entered into his inheritance. Dr. Knapp's
fine collection of Borrow books and manuscripts was handed over by his
widow to the American nation--to the Hispanic Society of New York. Dr.
Knapp's biography was followed nine years later by a small volume by Mr.
R. A. J. Walling, whose little book adds considerably to our knowledge
of Borrow's Cornish relatives, and is in every way a valuable monograph
on the author of _Lavengro_. Mr. Herbert Jenkins's book is more
ambitious. Within four hundred closely printed pages he has compressed
every incident in Borrow's career, and we would not quarrel with him nor
his publisher for calling his life a 'definitive biography' if one did
not know that there is not and cannot be anything 'definitive' about a
biography except in the case of a Master. Boswell, Lockhart, Mrs.
Gaskell are authors who had the advantage of knowing personally the
subjects of their biographies. Any biographer who has not met his hero
face to face and is dependent