{106} The main characters in _Lavengro_ are three: the scholar (Borrow himself), the gypsy (Mr. Petulengro), and the priest, or popish propagandist. This last is the man in black. The word-master has in the course of his travels heard a good deal about this man, and he is able to identify him almost at once by his predilection for gin and water, cold, with a lump of sugar in it. He hears of him first from his London friend, Francis Ardry, then from an Armenian merchant whom he met in London, and then again from a brother-author, who describes a silly and intrusive Anglican parson, called Platitude, as a puppet in the hands of "the man in black." The latter he characterises as a sharking priest, who has come over from Italy to proselytize and plunder; he has "some powers of conversation and some learning, but he carries the countenance of an arch-villain; Platitude is evidently his tool." {107} When Borrow (Lavengro, that is), was in London, his friend Francis Ardry warned him against a certain papistical propagandist: "A strange fellow--a half Italian, half English priest . . . he is fond of a glass of gin and water--and over a glass of gin and water cold, with a lump of sugar in it, he has been more communicative, perhaps, than was altogether prudent. Were I my own master, I would kick him, politics and religious movements, to a considerable distance." {110} During his travels after his abandonment of Grub Street, "Lavengro" frequently came upon the traces of the man in black. While sojourning for one night with a hospitable though superstitious acquaintance, whom he met after leaving Salisbury, "Lavengro" heard the story of the Rev. Mr. Platitude, a sacerdotalist of weak intellects who had been cajoled from his lawful allegiance to the "good, quiet Church of England," by the wiles of a sharking priest come over from Italy to proselytize and to plunder. From what he then heard of the sharking priest, by putting two and two together, Lavengro was now able to identify him with the "man in black." Subsequently he heard of the efforts of the same clever dialectician to overcome the Methodist preacher Peter Williams--efforts which collapsed upon the appearance of the preacher's wife Winifred. "Wife, wife," muttered the disconcerted priest, "if the fool has a wife he will never do for us." In the course of his wanderings this nineteenth-century S. Augustine often gave himself out to be a teacher of elocution.