probable consequence; to the affray abroad succeeds an affray at home; the mischievous example reaches the children, cramps them or scatters them, and misery for life is the consequence." As Cobbett wrote against tea so was Borrow to write against the Pope. Being a reading and a writing man who had set down all his most substantial adventures in earlier books, Borrow, says Mr. Thomas Seccombe, had no choice but "to interpret autobiography as 'autobiographiction.'" {50} Parts of the autobiography, he says, are "as accurate and veracious as John Wesley's 'Journal,' but the way in which the dingle ingredients" [in the stories of Isopel Berners, the postillion, and the Man in Black] "are mingled, and the extent to which lies--damned lies--or facts predominate, will always be a fascinating topic for literary conjecture." It must not be forgotten, however, that Borrow never called the published book his autobiography. He did something like what I believe young writers often do; he described events in his own life with modifications for the purpose of concealment in some cases and of embellishment in others. If he had never labelled it an autobiography there would have been no mystery, and the conclusion of readers would be that most of it could not have been invented, but that the postillion's story, for example, is a short story written to embody some facts and some opinions, without any appearance of being the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If Borrow made a set of letters to the Bible Society into a book like "Gil Blas," he could hardly do less--especially when he had been reminded of the fact--with his remoter adventures; and having taken out dates and names of persons and places he felt free. He produced his view of himself, as De Quincey did in his "Confessions of an English Opium Eater." This view was modified by his public reputation, by his too potent memory and the need for selection, by his artistic sense, and by his literary training. So far from suffering by the two elements, if they are to be separated, of fiction and autobiography, "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye" gain immensely. The autobiographical form--the use of the first person singular--is no mere device to attract an interest and belief as in "Captain Singleton" and a thousand novels. Again and again we are made perfectly certain that the man could not have written otherwise. He is sounding his own depths, and out of mere shyness, at times, uses the transparent amateur trick of pretending that he was writing of someone else. Years afterwards, when Mr. Watts-Dunton asked him, "What is the real nature of autobiography?" he answered in questions: "Is it a mere record of the incidents of a man's life? or is it a picture of the man himself--his character, his soul?" CHAPTER VI--THE BIOGRAPHER'S MATERIAL