Professor Knapp, Borrow's biographer, seems to place implicit confidence in _Lavengro_; I find myself unable to agree with him. Borrow may really have written the story of _Joseph Sell_ for a collection of Christmas tales; he may really have camped for some weeks as a tinker near Willenhall; "Belle Berners" may really have had some prototype; and he may really have bought the splendid horse of the Willenhall tavern-keeper, and sold it afterwards at Horncastle. But is the "Man in Black," then, also a reality, and the "Reverend Mr. Platitude," who thanks God that he has left all his Church of England prejudices in Italy? in other words, did Tractarianism exist in 1825, eight years before it was engendered by Keble's sermon? David Haggart, again, the Scottish Jack Sheppard,--Borrow describes him as "a lad of some fifteen years," with "prodigious breadth of chest," and as defeating in single combat a full-grown baker's apprentice. Borrow well may have seen him, for in July 1813 he really enlisted as a drummer in Borrow's father's regiment, newly quartered in Edinburgh Castle; but he was not fifteen then, only twelve years old. And the Jew pedlar scene in the first chapter, and the old apple-woman's son in the sixty-second! One might take equal exception to Borrow's pretended visits to Iceland, Moultan, and Kiachta (he was never within three thousand miles of Kiachta); to his translation of St. Luke's Gospel into Basque, of which he had only the merest smattering; and to his statement to a Cornish clergyman in 1854 that his "horrors" were due to the effects of Mrs. Herne's poison--he had suffered from them seven years before his Gypsy wanderings. But the strongest proof of his lax adherence to fact is adduced by Professor Knapp himself. In chapter xvi. of _Lavengro_, Borrow relates how in 1818, at Tombland Fair, Norwich, he doffed his hat to the great trotting stallion, Marshland Shales, "drew a deep _ah_! and repeated the words of the old fellows around, 'Such a horse as this we shall never see again; a pity that he is so old.'" Yes, but as Professor Knapp has found out, with his infinite painstaking, Marshland Shales (1802-35) was not thus paraded until 12th April 1827.