Borrow’s “Flaming Tinman” is, of course, a brilliant success, but then he, though named Bosville, is not a pure gypsy. He is what is called on the roads, I believe, a “half and half”; and in nothing is more clearly seen that “prepotency of transmission,” which I have elsewhere attributed to the Anglo-Saxon in the racial struggle, than in hybrids of this kind. A thorough-bred Romany chal can be brutal enough, but the “Flaming Tinman’s” peculiar shade of brutality is Anglo-Saxon, not Romany. The Tinman’s ironical muttering while unharnessing his horse, “Afraid. H’m! Afraid; that was the word, I think,” is worthy of Dickens at his very best—worthy of Dickens when he created Rogue Riderhood—but it is hardly Romany, I think. The battle in the dingle is superb. Borrow is always at his strongest when describing a pugilistic encounter: for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English accomplishment, he believed as devoutly almost as he believed in East Anglia and the Bible. It was this more than anything else that aroused the ire of the critics of “Lavengro” when it first appeared. One critical journal characterised the book as the work of a “barbarian.” This was in 1851, when Clio seemed set upon substituting Harlequin’s wand for Britannia’s trident, seemed set upon crowning her with the cap and bells of Folly in her maudlin mood,—the marvellous and memorable year when England—while every forge in Europe was glowing with expectance, ready to beat every ploughshare into a sword—uttered her famous prophecy, that from the day of the opening of the Prince Consort’s glass show in Hyde Park, bullets, bayonets, and fists were to be institutions of a benighted past.