“daughter” whose accomplishments Borrow celebrated in the exordium to “Wild Wales” was his stepdaughter, Henrietta Clarke. He seemed now in an enviable position, with a small but agreeable freehold on the banks of Oulton Broad, able to indulge in “idleness and the pride of literature” to his heart’s content. If he had had a “club” or a Boswell about him, he might still have been tolerably happy. But he was not a clubbable man, Borrow! Nevertheless it was during the years that followed that, like Johnson, he achieved his best title to fame, the wondrous five volumes of autobiography so capriciously planned and so strangely entitled “Lavengro—Romany Rye.” The stimulus in his case was largely, we believe, if not mainly, pecuniary. “Money is our best friend” he wrote to his wife in 1844. He wanted a purse of his own to travel and give dinners with, for the edge of episcopal hospitality was already wearing off. He desired too, no doubt, to put a coping stone to his fame. Already in January, 1843, he wrote to his publisher that he had begun upon a Robinson Borrow, and Murray, Ford, and other friends threw up their caps. The publisher may have well seen a veritable gold mine in prospect. One has only to imagine the fervent curiosity which the personal element in “The Bible in Spain,” so suggestive of mystery and romance, must have exalted in the reading public of 1843, to perceive that any such anticipation was fully warranted by the facts of the case. Here was a book which bore upon its title-page its passport to Sunday reading as a good, serious, missionary work, but for which it was manifest, as the surprised and delighted reader proceeded, that not Bishop Heber or the good Schwartz, but Mendoza and Lesage had been taken as models. May not people well have wondered (the good, pious English folk, to whom “luck” was a scandal, as the Bible Society’s secretary wrote to Borrow) what manner of man this muleteer-missionary might be? The incongruity was only heightened by familiarity with Borrow’s Pharaoh-like visage, abundant grey hair, and tall blonde Scandinavian figure, which reminded those who came under his spell of those roving Northmen of the days of simple medieval devotion, who were wont to signalize their conversion from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pilgrimage. But if publisher and client were justified in believing that they had discovered an autobiographical El Dorado, they were, none the less, to be sadly undeceived.