Mention of _Lavengro_ suggests a paragraph on one of the most curious developments to be noticed in the history of the art. All that we have examined so far have been from truth to fiction; this is a movement from fiction to truth. Stories of the deeds of a man have become romances of the deeds of a hero. A biography has changed as we watched it into a tale of miracle. Here is a quite different phenomenon. An imaginary autobiography that pretends to be real, of a rascally hero, makes it possible for rogues to write real autobiographies that pretend to be imaginary. _Lavengro_ and the _Romany Rye_ are two parts of a rogue novel constructed like the oldest of the kind. They contain a hero somehow put on a different plane from that of respectable society, and the books are made up of the people he meets and the things they say and do to him, or make him do and say. 'Why,' says Borrow, whose attitude towards life is as confident as Lazarillo's, 'there is not a chapter in the present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the present one, and this is not yet terminated.' [The development of the rogue novel.] But Borrow and other makers of confessions are not of the direct line, in spite of the roguish and adventurous air that clings about them as they rest upon our shelves. _Lazarillo_ had many sincerer and more immediate flatterers--Thomas Nash, for example, whose _Jacke Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller_, holds in itself, as one of the earliest pieces of realism in English literature, more than enough of interest for an essay. He had also many younger brothers at home, and an enormous progeny, and it has so happened that the influence of the rogue novel on our own fiction was exerted through them, and not through his early imitations in France and England. Cervantes used its form for the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and, combining the picaresque spirit with that of the tales of chivalry, produced the first realistic romance. Many lesser writers were content to follow Lazarillo's lead without such independent ingenuity. They brought up their literary children to be heroes after Lazarillo's fashion and were proud to have him as a godfather. In their hands the rogue novel retained its form and gained only a multiplicity of incident, a hundred writers earnestly devising new swindles and more exciting adventures for the hero, whose personality under all their buffetings remained constant to its original characteristics. No nation has shown more fertility in fancy than the Spanish. We owe to Spain half the trap-door excitements, half the eavesdropping discoveries, half the ingenious plots and counter-plots of the theatre. And when we remember that for a hundred and fifty years the rogue novel had been one of the most popular forms of Spanish literature, we need not wonder that Le Sage, in turning over volume after volume of the lives of Spanish rascals,