xpensive to dine on bread and cheese, especially when one
is fond of cheese, as I am. My last bread and cheese dinner cost me
fourteen pence. There is drink, sir; with bread and cheese one must
drink porter, sir.'

"'Then, sir, eat bread--bread alone. As good men as yourself have eaten
bread alone; they have been glad to get it, sir. If with bread and
cheese you must drink porter, sir, with bread alone you can, perhaps,
drink water, sir.'

"However, I got paid at last for my writings in the review, not, it is
true, in the current coin of the realm, but in certain bills; there were
two of them, one payable at twelve, and the other at eighteen months
after date."

The incident serves to diversify the narrative, and may be taken from his
own London experiences, while the particular merriment of the rhyme is
Borrow's; but it is not of the essence of the book, and fits only
indifferently into the mysterious "Arabian Nights" London, the city of
the gallant Ardry and the old apple-woman who called him "dear" and
called Moll Flanders "blessed Mary Flanders." Sir Richard will not
mysteriously re-appear, nor will Captain and Mrs. Borrow. I should say,
in fact, that characters of this class have scarcely at all the power of
motion. What is more, they take us not only a little way out of Borrow's
world sometimes, but away from Borrow himself.

Apart from these characters, the men and women of "Lavengro" and "The
Romany Rye" are all in harmony with one another, with Borrow, and with
Borrow's world. Jasper Petulengro and his wife, his sister Ursula, the
gigantic Tawno Chikno, the witch Mrs. Herne, and the evil sprite Leonora,
Thurtell, the fighting men, the Irish outlaw Jerry Grant, who was
suspected of raising a storm by "something Irish and supernatural" to win
a fight, Murtagh, that wicked innocent, the old apple-woman, Blazing
Bosville, Isopel Berners, the jockey who drove one hundred and ten miles
in eleven hours to see "the only friend he ever had in the world," John
Thurtell, and say, "God Almighty bless you, Jack!" before the drop fell,
the old gentleman who had learned "Sergeant Broughton's guard" and
knocked out the bullying coachman, the Welsh preacher and his wife, the
Arcadian old bee-keeper, the rat-catcher--all these and their companions
are woven into one piece by the genius of their creator, Borrow. I can
imagine them all greeting him together as the Gypsies did, and much as
the jockey did afterwards: