death, religious gloom (“the horrors”), solitariness, and disappointment. He experienced a series of rebuffs, failing in succession to obtain a Consulship, a seat on the quorum, employment in China, and a manuscript-hunting mission from the British Museum. His unrivalled qualifications as a linguist failed to obtain for him posts for which he was eminently fitted, but to which he saw inferior men preferred. If a roving commission or an administrative post could have been found for him abroad, by preference in the East as he himself desired, hard work might have gone far to exorcise his melancholy, and we might have had from his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added lustre to a group of writers already represented in England by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton. With Burton’s love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of “The Bible in Spain” had many points in common. As it was, with brief intervals of solitary excursion in the “Celtic fringe” or the Near East, Borrow remained glooming at home, working himself up into a state of nervous excitement bordering upon dementia about a neighbour’s dog or a railway bisecting his wife’s land. The gloom, of course, was not chronic. There were days upon which he was himself again, the old George Borrow. Generally speaking, his days and years were passed in a moody inactivity, now at Oulton, then at Yarmouth, next in London, finally at Oulton again, where he “died, as he had lived, alone” on July 26, 1881. It seemed for the time as if he had outlived his reputation. Appearances are proverbially deceptive.