e curtain of his own
eventful biography. We collected from his former work that he was not
always what he now is. The pursuits and society of his youth scarcely
could be denominated, in Troloppian euphemism, _la creme de la creme_;
but they stood him in good stead; then and there was he trained for the
encounter of Spain . . . whilst sowing his wild oats, he became
passionately fond of horseflesh. . . .

"How much has Mr. Borrow yet to remember, yet to tell! let him not delay.
His has been a life, one day of which is more crowded than is the
fourscore-year vegetation of a squire or alderman. . . . Everything seems
sealed on a memory, wax to receive and marble to retain. He is not
subjective. He has the new fault of not talking about self. We vainly
want to know what sort of person must be the pilgrim in whose wanderings
we have been interested. That he has left to other pens. . . ."

Then Ford went on to identify Borrow with the mysterious Unknown of
Colonel Napier's newly-published book.

He began to write his autobiography to fulfil the expectations of Ford
and his own public. It was not until 1844, exactly four years after his
return from Spain, that he set out again on foreign travel. He made
stops at Paris, Vienna, Constantinople, Venice, and Rome, but spent most
of his time in Hungary and Roumania, visiting the Gypsies and compiling a
"vocabulary of the Gypsy language as spoken in Hungary and Transylvania,"
which still exists in manuscript. He was seven months away altogether.

Knapp possessed documents proving that Borrow was at this and that place,
and the Gypsy vocabulary is in the British Museum, but little other
record of these seven months remains. Knapp, indeed, takes it for
granted that the historical conversation between Borrow and the Magyar in
"The Romany Rye" was drawn from his experiences in Hungary and
Transylvania in the year 1844; but that is absurd, as the chapter might
have been written by a man born and bred in the reading room of the
British Museum who had never met any but similar unfortunates. It is
very likely that the journey was a failure, and if it had been a success,
an account of it would have interrupted the progress of the
autobiography, as Ford expected it to do. But the thing was too
deliberate to succeed. Borrow's right instinct was to get work which
would take him abroad; he failed, and so he travelled because travel
offered him relief from his melancholy and unres