friendship which I bore to you. But how could I help him? He
was speedily after removed from St. James, I know not whither. It is
said that he disappeared on the road.'

"Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Where in the whole cycle of
romance shall we find anything more wild, grotesque, and sad than the
easily authenticated history of Benedict Mol, the treasure-digger of St.
James?"

Knapp, by the way, prints this very letter from Rey Romero. It was his
son who saw Benedict in prison, and he simply says that he does not know
what has become of him.

As Dr. Knapp says, Borrow painted from a model. That is to say, he did
like everybody else. Of course he did not invent. Why should a man with
such a life invent for the purpose of only five books? But there is no
such thing as invention (in the popular sense), except in the making of
_bad_ nonsense rhymes or novels. A writer composes out of his
experience, inward, outward and histrionic, or along the protracted lines
of his experience. Borrow felt that adventures and unusual scenes were
his due, and when they were not forthcoming he revived an old one or
revised the present in the weird light of the past. Is this invention?

Pictures like that of Benedict Mol are not made out of nothing by Borrow
or anybody else. Nor are they copies. The man who could merely copy
nature would never have the eyes to see such beauties as Benedict Mol. It
must be noticed how effective is the re-appearance, the intermingling of
such a man with "ordinary life," and then finally the suggestion of one
of Borrow's enemies that he was put up to it by _Don Jorge_--"That fellow
is at the bottom of half the _picardias_ which happen in Spain." What
glory for _Don Jorge_. The story would have been entertaining enough as
a mere isolated short story: thus scattered, it is twice as effective as
if it were a mere fiction, whether labelled "a true story" or introduced
by an ingenious variation of the same. It is one of Borrow's triumphs
never to let us escape from the spell of actuality into a languid
acquiescence in what is "only pretending." The form never becomes a
fiction, even to the same extent as that of Turgenev's "Sportsman's
Sketches"; for Borrow is always faithful to the form of a book of travel
in Spain during the 'thirties. In "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas," the
lesser narratives are as a rule introduced without much attempt at
probability, but as mere diversions. They