_Lavengro; the Scholar_, _the Gypsy_, _the Priest_, eventually appeared in three volumes on Feb. 7th, 1851. The autobiographical _Lavengro_ stopped short in July 1825, at the conclusion of the hundredth chapter, with an abruptness worthy of the _Sentimental Journey_. The Author had succeeded in extending the area of mystery, but not in satisfying the public. Borrow's confidences were so very different in complexion from those which the critics seemed to have expected, that they were taken aback and declared to the public almost with one accord that the writer's eccentricities had developed into mannerisms, that his theories of life were political manifestoes, that his dialects were gibberish, and his defiance of the orthodox canons of autobiography scarcely less than an outrage upon the public taste. From the general public came a fusillade of requests to solve the prevailing mystery of the book. Was it fact or fiction?--or, if fact and fiction were blended, in what proportions? Borrow ought to have been prepared for a question so natural in the mouths of literary busy-bodies at any time, and especially at a time when partisan spirit was rampant, and the vitality of the lampoon as a factor in politics so far from extinct. To show his contempt alike for the critical verdict and the popular curiosity, after a quarrel, or at least a sharp coolness with John Murray, he published in two volumes, in May 1857, _The Romany Rye_, which carries on the story of _Lavengro_ for just about a month further, namely, down towards the end of August 1825, and there again stops dead. Whether we regard coherence or the rate of progress, no more attempt at amendment is perceptible than can be discerned in the later as compared with the earlier volumes of _Tristram Shandy_. The peculiarities of the earlier volume are, indeed, here accentuated, while the Author had evidently only been confirmed by the lapse of years in the political philosophy to which he had already given expression. At the end was printed an appendix (a sort of _catalogue raisonne_ of Borrovian prejudices), satirising with unmeasured bitterness the critics of _Lavengro_.