But, unfortunately, his love of the wonderful, his instinct for exaggeration, asserts itself even here. I need give only one instance of what I mean. He makes Isopel Berners speak of herself as being taller than Lavengro. Now, as Borrow gives Lavengro his own character and physique in every detail, even to the silvery hair and even to the somewhat peculiar method of sparring, and as he himself stood six feet two inches, Isopel must have been better adapted to shine as a giantess in a show than as a fighting woman capable of cowing the “Flaming Tinman” himself. It is a very exceptional woman that can really stand up against a trained boxer, and it is, I believe, or used to be, an axiom among the nomads that no fighting woman ought to stand more than about five feet ten inches at the outside. A handsome young woman never looks so superb as when boxing; but it is under peculiar disadvantages that she spars with a man, inasmuch as she has, even when properly padded (as assuredly every woman ought to be) to guard her chest with even more care than she guards her face. The truth is, as Borrow must have known, that women, in order to stand a chance against men, must rely upon some special and surprising method of attack—such, for instance, as that of the sudden “left-hand body blow” of the magnificent gypsy girl of whose exploits I told him that day at “Gypsy Ring”—who, when travelling in England, was attached to Boswell’s boxing-booth, and was always accompanied by a favourite bantam cock, ornamented with a gold ring in each wattle, and trained to clap his wings and crow whenever he saw his mistress putting on the gloves—the most beautiful girl, gypsy or other, that ever went into East Anglia. This “left-hand body blow” of hers she delivered so unexpectedly, and with such an engine-like velocity, that but few boxers could “stop it.” But, with regard to Isopel Berners, neither Lavengro, nor the man she thrashed when he stole one of her flaxen hairs to conjure with, gives the reader the faintest idea of Isopel’s method of attack or defence, and we have to take her prowess on trust. In a word, Borrow was content to give us the Wonderful, without taking that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this exaggeration of Borrow’s, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to some of the most picturesque pages of “Lavengro.” IV. BORROW’S USE OF PATOIS.