"Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Where in the whole cycle of romance shall we find anything more wild, grotesque, and sad than the easily authenticated history of Benedict Mol, the treasure-digger of St. James?" Knapp, by the way, prints this very letter from Rey Romero. It was his son who saw Benedict in prison, and he simply says that he does not know what has become of him. As Dr. Knapp says, Borrow painted from a model. That is to say, he did like everybody else. Of course he did not invent. Why should a man with such a life invent for the purpose of only five books? But there is no such thing as invention (in the popular sense), except in the making of _bad_ nonsense rhymes or novels. A writer composes out of his experience, inward, outward and histrionic, or along the protracted lines of his experience. Borrow felt that adventures and unusual scenes were his due, and when they were not forthcoming he revived an old one or revised the present in the weird light of the past. Is this invention? Pictures like that of Benedict Mol are not made out of nothing by Borrow or anybody else. Nor are they copies. The man who could merely copy nature would never have the eyes to see such beauties as Benedict Mol. It must be noticed how effective is the re-appearance, the intermingling of such a man with "ordinary life," and then finally the suggestion of one of Borrow's enemies that he was put up to it by _Don Jorge_--"That fellow is at the bottom of half the _picardias_ which happen in Spain." What glory for _Don Jorge_. The story would have been entertaining enough as a mere isolated short story: thus scattered, it is twice as effective as if it were a mere fiction, whether labelled "a true story" or introduced by an ingenious variation of the same. It is one of Borrow's triumphs never to let us escape from the spell of actuality into a languid acquiescence in what is "only pretending." The form never becomes a fiction, even to the same extent as that of Turgenev's "Sportsman's Sketches"; for Borrow is always faithful to the form of a book of travel in Spain during the 'thirties. In "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas," the lesser narratives are as a rule introduced without much attempt at probability, but as mere diversions. They are never such in "The Bible in Spain," though they are in "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye." The Gypsy hag of Badajoz, who proposed to poison all the _Busne_ in Madrid, and then away with the London Caloro to the land of the Moor--his Greek servant Antonio, even though he begins with "Je vais vous raconter mon histoire du commencement jusqu'ici."--the Italian whom he had met as a boy and who now regretted leaving England, the toasted cheese and bread, the Suffolk ale, the roaring song and merry jests of the labourers,--and Antonio again, telling him "the history of the young man of the inn,"--these story-tellers are not merely consummate variations upon