alive, brother!'"

But how delicate it is, the two lads talking amidst the furze of
Mousehold Heath at sunset. And so with the rest. As he grows older the
atmosphere thins but never quite fades away; even Thurtell, the
bull-necked friend of bruisers, is as much a spirit as a man.

Mr. Watts-Dunton has complained {220} that Borrow makes Isopel taller
than Borrow, and therefore too tall for beauty. But Borrow was not
writing for readers who knew, or for those who, if they knew, always
remembered, that he was six-feet-two. We know that Lavengro is tall, but
we are not told so just before hearing that Isopel is taller; and the
effect is that we think, not too distinctly, of a girl who somehow
succeeds in being very tall and beautiful. If Borrow had said: "Whereas
I was six feet two inches, the girl was six feet two and three-quarter
inches," it would have been different, and it would not have been Borrow,
who, as I say, was not writing of ponderable, measurable bodies, but of
possible immortal souls curiously dressed in flesh that can be almost as
invisible. So again, Mr. Watts-Dunton says:

"With regard to Isopel Berners, neither Lavengro, nor the man she
thrashed when he stole one of her flaxen hairs to conjure with, gives the
reader the faintest idea of Isopel's method of attack or defence, and we
have to take her prowess on trust. In a word Borrow was content to give
us the wonderful, without taking that trouble to find for it a logical
basis which a literary master would have taken. And instances might
easily be multiplied of this exaggeration of Borrow's, which is apt to
lend a sense of unreality to some of the most picturesque pages of
'Lavengro.'"

But would Mr. Watts-Dunton seriously like to have these scenes touched up
by Driscoll or Sullivan. Borrow did not write for real or imaginary
connoisseurs.

I do not mean that a man need sacrifice his effect upon the ordinary man
by satisfying the connoisseur. No one, for example, will deny that a
ship by Mr. Joseph Conrad is as beautiful and intelligible as one by
Stevenson; but neither would it be safe to foretell that Mr. Conrad's,
the more accurate, will seem the more like life in fifty years' time.
Borrow is never technical. If he quotes Gypsy it is not for the sake of
the colour effect on those who read Gypsy as they run. His effects are
for a certain distance and in a certain atmosphere where technicality
would be impertinent.

Mr. Hindes Groome