into the secrets of the Romanies, and relieves her feelings by administering poison to the intruder, and then trying to poke out his eye as he is lying apparently in his last agonies. But she seems to be highly respected by her victim as well as by her own people, and to be acting in accordance with the moral teaching of her tribe. Her design is frustrated by the appearance of a Welsh Methodist preacher, who, like every other strange being, is at once compelled to unbosom himself to this odd confessor. He fancies himself to have committed the unpardonable sin at the age of six, and is at once comforted by Borrow's sensible observation that he should not care if he had done the same thing twenty times over at the same period. The grateful preacher induces his consoler to accompany him to the borders of Wales; but there Borrow suddenly stops on the ground that he should prefer to enter Wales in a suit of superfine black, mounted on a powerful steed like that which bore Greduv to the fight of Catrath, and to be welcomed at a dinner of the bards, as the translator of the odes of the great Ab Gwilym. And Mr. Petulengro opportunely turns up at the instant, and Borrow rides back with him, and hears that Mrs. Herne has hanged herself, and celebrates the meeting by a fight without gloves, but in pure friendliness, and then settles down to the life of a blacksmith in his secluded dingle. Certainly it is a queer topsy-turvy world to which we are introduced in 'Lavengro.' It gives the reader the sensation of a strange dream in which all the miscellaneous population of caravans and wayside tents make their exits and entrances at random, mixed with such eccentrics as the distinguished author, who has a mysterious propensity for touching odd objects as a charm against evil. All one's ideas are dislocated when the centre of interest is no longer in the thick of the crowd, but in that curious limbo whither drift all the odd personages who live in the interstices without being caught by the meshes of the great network of ordinary convention. Perhaps the oddity repels many readers; but to me it always seems that Borrow's dingle represents a little oasis of genuine romance—a kind of half-visionary fragment of fairyland, which reveals itself like the enchanted castle in the vale of St. John, and then vanishes after tantalising and arousing one's curiosity. It will never be again discovered by any flesh-and-blood traveller; but, in my imaginary travels, I like to rusticate there for a time, and to feel as if the gipsy was the true possessor of the secret of life, and we who travel by rail and read newspapers and consider ourselves to be sensible men of business, were but vexatious intruders upon this sweet dream. There must, one supposes, be a history of England from the Petulengro point of view, in which the change of dynasties recognised by Hume and Mr. Freeman, or the oscillations of power between Lord Beaconsfield and Mr.