To find a life really in harmony with a rustic environment, we must not go to raw settlements where man is still fighting with the outside world, but to some region where a reconciliation has been worked out by an experience of centuries. And amidst all the restlessness of modern improvers we may still find a few regions where the old genius has not been quite exorcised. Here and there, in country lanes, and on the edge of unenclosed commons, we may still meet the gipsy—the type of a race adapted to live in the interstices of civilisation, having something of the indefinable grace of all wild animals, and yet free from the absolute savagery of the genuine wilderness. To mention gipsies is to think of George Borrow; and I always wonder that the author of the 'Bible in Spain' and 'Lavengro' is not more popular. Certainly, I have found no more delightful guide to the charming nooks and corners of rural England. I would give a good deal to identify that remarkable dingle in which he met so singular a collection of characters. Does it really exist, I wonder, anywhere on this island? or did it ever exist? and, if so, has it become a railway-station, and what has become of Isopel Berners and 'Blazing Bosville, the flaming Tinman?' His very name is as good as a poem, and the battle in which Borrow floored the Tinman by that happy left-handed blow is, to my mind, more delightful than the fight in 'Tom Brown,' or that in which Dobbin acted as the champion of Osborne. Borrow is a 'humourist' of the first water. He lives in a world of his own—a queer world with laws peculiar to itself, and yet one which has all manner of odd and unexpected points of contact with the prosaic world of daily experience. Borrow's Bohemianism is no revolt against the established order. He does not invoke nature or fly to the hedges because society is corrupt or the world unsatisfying, or because he has some kind of new patent theory of life to work out. He cares nothing for such fancies. On the contrary, he is a staunch conservative, full of good old-fashioned prejudices. He seems to be a case of the strange re-appearance of an ancestral instinct under altered circumstances. Some of his forefathers must have been gipsies by temperament if not by race; and the impulses due to that strain have got themselves blended with the characteristics of the average Englishman. The result is a strange and yet, in a way, harmonious and original type which made the 'Bible in Spain' a puzzle to the average reader. The name suggested a work of the edifying class. Here was a good respectable emissary of the Bible Society going to convert poor papists by a distribution of the Scriptures. He has returned to write a long tract setting forth the difficulties of his enterprise, and the stiff-neckedness of the Spanish people. The luckless reader who took up the book on that understanding was destined to a strange disappointment. True, Borrow appeared to take his enterprise quite