Gypsy language was: {310}

"Whether or not Mr. Borrow has in the course of his long experience
become the _deep_ Gypsy which he has always been supposed to be, we
cannot say; but it is certain that his present book contains little more
than he gave to the public forty years ago, and does not by any means
represent the present state of knowledge on the subject. But at the
present day, when comparative philology has made such strides, and when
want of accurate scholarship is as little tolerated in strange and remote
languages as in classical literature, the 'Romano Lavo-Lil' is, to speak
mildly, an anachronism."

Nor, apart from the word-book and Gypsy specimens, is the book a good
example of Borrow's writing. The accounts of visits to Gypsies at Kirk
Yetholm, Wandsworth, Pottery Lane (Notting Hill), and Friar's Mount
(Shore-ditch), are interesting as much for what they tell us of Borrow's
recreations in London as for anything else. The portrait of the "dark,
mysterious, beautiful, terrible" Mrs. Cooper, the story of Clara Bosvil,
the life of Ryley Bosvil--"a thorough Gypsy, versed in all the arts of
the old race, had two wives, never went to church, and considered that
when a man died he was cast into the earth, and there was an end of
him"--and his death and burial ceremony, and some of Borrow's own
opinions, for example, in favour of Pontius Pilate and George IV.--these
are simple and vigorous in the old style. They show that with a
sufficient impulse he could have written another book at least equal to
"Wild Wales." But these uneven fragments were not worthy of the living
man. They were the sort of thing that his friends might have been
expected to gather up after he was dead. Scraps like this from "Wisdom
of the Egyptians," are well enough:

"'My father, why were worms made?' 'My son, that moles might live by
eating them.' 'My father, why were moles made?' 'My son, that you and I
might live by catching them.' 'My father, why were you and I made?' 'My
son, that worms might live by eating us.'"

Related to Borrow, and to a living Gypsy, by Borrow's pen, how much
better! It is a book that can be browsed on again and again, but hardly
ever without this thought. It was the result of ambition, and might have
been equal to its predecessors, but competition destroyed the impulse of
ambition and spoilt the book.

"Romano Lavo-Lil" was his last book. For posthumous publication he left
only "The Turkish Jest