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 {221a} was more justified in saying: "Mr. Borrow, no doubt, knows the Gypsies well, and could describe them perfectly. But his love of effect leads him away. In his wish to impress his reader with a certain mysterious notion of himself, he colours his Gypsy pictures (the _form_ of which is quite accurate) in a fantastic style, which robs them altogether of the value they would have as studies from life."