George Borrow’s life and works are one and the same thing. Few great writers have been more persistently autobiographical than Borrow was. Boswell, said Johnson once, had only two subjects, Dr. Johnson and James Boswell, and he, the Doctor, was heartily sick of both; but Borrow had only one subject—himself, from which he practically never wandered. The merry gests and marvellous exploits of the incomparable George Borrow—these form the unique theme of our Gitano Crusoe. But it is not enough to say that Borrow’s autobiographical methods are unique. His life is presented to us in four panels, each as unlike the others as it is possible to be in size, shape, texture, and surface. The scale varies as much as that of an ordnance map, sometimes 25 inches to the mile, at others five miles to the inch. The colours upon the palette are artfully changed, details are sometimes obtruded, at others significantly hidden. A casual glance obscures rather than reveals the fact that, whether he is writing of his early life and struggles (“Lavengro,” i.–lviii.), of one vivid Bohemian episode of his early manhood (“Lavengro”—“Romany Rye”), of the crowning triumph of his maturity (“Bible in Spain”), or of a vacation tour during the autumn of a disappointed life (“Wild Wales”), Borrow was always working upon the same model, with the same desperate and conscientious zeal, with the same extraordinary gust and vigour, with the same genius, the same bias, the same limitations. As a man of letters he must be judged primarily as a biographer, and, if this be done, it will be found that Borrow has achieved the great object of biography; he has transmitted a great personality. The blemishes in his work are not particularly hard to find. Inadvertently we may have been betrayed into indicating one or two of them. But it is not by any means safe ground. With the exception of Jane Austen (and temporarily speaking, perhaps Charles Dickens) there is hardly any literary character whom it is so dangerous to approach without passports and periphrases (securing retreat, if necessary) and plentiful kow-tows as George Borrow. Among all literary clansmen you shall hardly find one more implacable, more fierce, or more blindly fanatical than your Borrovian. Charles Lamb is almost the only author we can think of (out of Scotland) who is worshipped by his admirers with quite the same canine sort of affection. But the cult of Lamb is restricted largely to briefless Templars, to University men and “Oxford M.A.’s”; the Borrovian is drawn from a lower social stratum, from printers, librarians, booksellers, and others who seldom read books, from indexers, dictionary makers, and such harmless drudges of literature. To men of such close and restricted horizons the breath of the Romany Rye is as that of “the wind on the heath, brother.” Hence the stern and unbending jealousy of their cult. Real literary enthusiasts of advanced years are almost as rare in our streets as