e to this book as it was finally published in 1860, Borrow
said that the little Welsh bookseller had rejected it for fear of being
ruined--"The terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the
genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . I had no
idea, till I read him in English, that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible
fellow."

In September, 1830, Borrow left London and returned to Norwich, having
done nothing which attracted attention or deserved to. His brother's
opinion was that his want of success in life was due chiefly to his being
unlike other people. So far as his failure in literature went, it was
due to the fact that he was doing either poorly or only moderately well
work that very few people wanted to read, viz., chiefly verse
translations from unfashionable languages. It may be also that his
health was partly the cause and was in turn lowered by the long continued
failure. When Borrow, at the age of forty or more, came to write about
the first twenty-two years of his life, he not only described himself
suffering from several attacks of "the horrors," but also with almost
equal vividness three men suffering from mental afflictions of different
kinds: the author who lived alone and was continually touching things to
avert the evil chance; the old man who had saved himself from being
overwhelmed in his terrible misfortunes by studying the inscriptions on
Chinese pots, but could not tell the time; and the Welshman who wandered
over the country preaching and living piously, but haunted by the
knowledge that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy
Ghost. The most vivid description of his "horrors," which he said in
1834 always followed if they did not result from weakness, is in the
eighty-fourth chapter of "Lavengro":

"Heaviness had suddenly come over me, heaviness of heart, and of body
also. I had accomplished the task which I had imposed upon myself, and
now that nothing more remained to do, my energies suddenly deserted me,
and I felt without strength, and without hope. Several causes, perhaps,
co-operated to bring about the state in which I then felt myself. It is
not improbable that my energies had been overstrained during the work,
the progress of which I have attempted to describe; and every one is
aware that the results of overstrained energies are feebleness and
lassitude--want of nourishment might likewise have something to do with
it. During my soj