I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessible to all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow. Such re-arrangement will sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them. The total impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it must inevitably be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish, and I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies--damned lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in possession of all the facts. In most cases the fact--to use an equivocal term--is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow's impression is as green as grass. His "lies" are lies only in the same sense as all clothing is a lie. For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn brotherhood with him as a boy. He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy, and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro. In print he was given the name Jasper Petulengro--Petulengro being Gypsy for shoesmith--and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most unforgetable of heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his form and character have probably created quite a new value for the name of Jasper. Well, Jasper Petulengro lives. Ambrose Smith died in 1878, at the age of seventy-four, after being visited by the late Queen Victoria at Knockenhair Park: he was buried in Dunbar Cemetery. {2} In the matter of his own name Borrow made another creative change of a significant kind. He was christened George Henry Borrow on July 17th (having been born on the 5th), 1803, at East Dereham, in Norfolk. As a boy he signed his name, George Henry Borrow. As a young man of the Byronic age and a translator of Scandinavian literature, he called himself in print, George Olaus Borrow. His biographer, Dr. William Ireland Knapp, says that Borrow's first name "expressed the father's admiration for the reigning monarch," George III.; but there is no reason to believe this, and certainly Borrow himself made of the combination which he finally adopted--George Borrow--something that retains not the slightest flavour of any other George. Such changes are common enough. John Richard Jefferies becomes Richard Jefferies; Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson becomes Robert Louis Stevenson. But Borrow could touch nothing without transmuting it. For example, in his Byronic period, when he was about twenty years of age, he was translating "romantic ballads" from the Danish. In the last verse of one of these, called "Elvir Hill," he takes the liberty of using the Byronic "lay":