"For one of late origin I will not deny, O Cerberus, that thou hast brought to us many a booty from the island of our enemies, by means of tobacco, a weed the cause of much deceit; for how much deceit is practised in carrying it about, in mixing it, and in weighing it: a weed which entices some people to bib ale; others to curse, swear, and to flatter in order to obtain it, and others to tell lies in denying that they use it: a weed productive of maladies in various bodies, the excess of which is injurious to every man's body, without speaking of his _soul_: a weed, moreover, by which we get multitudes of the poor, whom we should never get did they not set their love on tobacco, allow it to master them, and pull the bread from the mouths of their children." In the preface to this book as it was finally published in 1860, Borrow said that the little Welsh bookseller had rejected it for fear of being ruined--"The terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of their wits. . . . I had no idea, till I read him in English, that Elis Wyn had been such a terrible fellow." In September, 1830, Borrow left London and returned to Norwich, having done nothing which attracted attention or deserved to. His brother's opinion was that his want of success in life was due chiefly to his being unlike other people. So far as his failure in literature went, it was due to the fact that he was doing either poorly or only moderately well work that very few people wanted to read, viz., chiefly verse translations from unfashionable languages. It may be also that his health was partly the cause and was in turn lowered by the long continued failure. When Borrow, at the age of forty or more, came to write about the first twenty-two years of his life, he not only described himself suffering from several attacks of "the horrors," but also with almost equal vividness three men suffering from mental afflictions of different kinds: the author who lived alone and was continually touching things to avert the evil chance; the old man who had saved himself from being overwhelmed in his terrible misfortunes by studying the inscriptions on Chinese pots, but could not tell the time; and the Welshman who wandered over the country preaching and living piously, but haunted by the knowledge that in his boyhood he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. The most vivid description of his "horrors," which he said in 1834 always followed if they did not result from weakness, is in the eighty-fourth chapter of "Lavengro":