From that time I used to see Borrow often at Roehampton, sometimes at Putney, and sometimes, but not often, in London. I could have seen much more of him than I did had not the whirlpool of London, into which I plunged for a time, borne me away from this most original of men; and this is what I so greatly lament now: for of Borrow it may be said, as it was said of a greater man still, that “after Nature made _him_ she forthwith broke the mould.” The last time I ever saw him was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West-End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with “the last of Borrow” I shall never forget it. III. Students of Borrow will be as much surprised as pleased to find what a large collection of documents Dr. Knapp has been able to use in compiling this long-expected biography. {50} Indeed, the collection might have been larger and richer still. For instance, in the original manuscript of ‘Zincali’ (in the possession of the present writer) there are some variations from the printed text; but, what is of very much more importance, the whole—or nearly the whole—of Borrow’s letters to the Bible Society, which Dr. Knapp believed to be lost, have been discovered in the crypt of the Bible House in which the records of the Society are stored. But even without these materials two massive volumes crammed with documents throwing light upon the life and career of a man like George Borrow must needs be interesting to the student of English literature. For among all the remarkable characters that during the middle of the present century figured in the world of letters, the most eccentric, the most whimsical, and in every way the most extraordinary was surely the man whom Dr. Knapp calls, appropriately enough, his “hero.”