_Lavengro_ {0a} was written in 1843-50, years after the events recorded there. Several of its petty slips are probably due to sheer forgetfulness; _e.g._, as to the four "airts" of Edinburgh Castle, and the "lofty" town-walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed. And the rest, I imagine, were due partly to love of posing, but much more to an honest desire to produce an amusing and interesting book. Borrow was not writing a set autobiography, and it seems rather hard to imagine that he was, and then to come down on this or that inaccuracy. He did pose, though, all his life long, and in every one of his writings. He posed to poor old Esther Faa Blythe, the "queen" of the Yetholm Tinklers, when, on entering her little cottage, he "flung his arms up three times into the air, and in an exceedingly disagreeable voice exclaimed, '_Sossi your nav_?' etc." (_Word-Book_, p. 314). He posed shamefully to Lieut.-Col. Elers Napier (Knapp, i. 308-312); and he posed even to me, a mere lad, when I saw him thrice in 1872-73, at Ascot, at his house in Hereford Square, and at the Notting-hill Potteries (_Bookman_, Feb. 1893, pp. 147-48). Yet, what books he has given us, the very best of them _Lavengro_; its fight with the Flaming Tinman is the finest fight in all the world's literature. _Lavengro_, nevertheless, met with a very sorry reception. It was not genteel enough for the readers of Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton; and it is only since Borrow's death, on 26th July 1881, that it has won its due place of pre-eminence. "No man's writing," says Mr. Watts-Dunton, "can take you into the country as Borrow's can; it makes you feel the sunshine, smell the flowers, hear the lark sing and the grasshopper chirp." They who would know Borrow thoroughly should pass from his own works to Mr. Watts-Dunton's "Reminiscences of George Borrow" (_Athenaeum_, Sept. 3, 10, 1881), to his "Notes upon George Borrow" (_Lavengro_, Ward, Lock, Bowden, & Co., 1893), to Mr. William A. Dutt's _George Borrow in East Anglia_ (1896), to Unpublished Letters of George Borrow, first printed in the _Bible Society Reporter_ from July 1899 onwards, and above all, to Professor William I. Knapp's _Life_, _Writings_, _and Correspondence of George Borrow_ (2 vols. 1899). AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe a dream, partly of study, partly of adventure, in which will be found copious notices of books, and many descriptions of life and manners, some in a very unusual form.