Perhaps one reason why we have almost no record of what the greatest of all writing men was doing in the world is that while his friends were elbowing the tide of life in the streets of London, or fighting in the Low Countries, or carousing at the Mermaid Tavern, or at the Apollo Saloon, he was filling every moment with work—work which enabled him, before he reached his fifty-second year, to build up that literary monument of his, that edifice which made the monuments of the others, his contemporaries, seem like the handiwork of pigmies. But as regards Borrow, student though he was, it is not as an author that we think of him; it is as the adventurer, it is as the great Romany Rye, who discovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brother vagabond lived with them—lived with them “on the accont of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” to quote the “testimonial” of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell. Even by his personal appearance Borrow was marked off from his fellow-men. As a gipsy girl once remarked, “Nobody as ever see’d the white-headed Romany Rye ever forgot him.” Standing considerably above six feet in height, he was built as perfectly as a Greek statue, and his practice of athletic exercises gave his every movement the easy elasticity of an athlete under training. As to his countenance, “noble” is the only word that can be used to describe it. The silvery whiteness of the thick crop of hair seemed to add in a remarkable way to the beauty of the hairless face, but also it gave a strangeness to it, and this strangeness was intensified by a certain incongruity between the features (perfect Roman-Greek in type) and the Scandinavian complexion, luminous and sometimes rosy as an English girl’s. An increased intensity was lent by the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes. What struck the observer, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man’s appearance. It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it was the expression of the face as a whole. If it were possible to describe this expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shy self-consciousness.