Dr. Knapp has no doubt whatever that ‘Lavengro’ is in the main an autobiography. We have none. The only question is how much _Dichtung_ is mingled with the _Wahrheit_. Had it not been for the amazingly clumsy pieces of fiction which he threw into the narrative—such incidents as that of his meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman of London Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleep by reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographical nature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye.’ Such incidents as these shed an air of unreality over the whole. All writers upon Borrow fall into the mistake of considering him to have been an East Anglian. They might as well call Charlotte Brontë a Yorkshirewoman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of course, no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics. He inherited nothing from Norfolk save his accent and his love of “leg of mutton and turnips.” Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that has given birth to a man influences him throughout his life. The fact of Borrow’s having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident. His father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a common soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It so chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell in love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the sublime egotism of Borrow—perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of human nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe. There is, it must be confessed, something to us very agreeable in Dr. Knapp’s single-minded hero-worship. A scholar and a philologist himself, he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study of Borrow—following in Lavengro’s footsteps from one country to another with unflagging enthusiasm. Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worship runs to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow’s writings are condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr. Knapp, while the most unanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented. For instance, at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman who read ‘Zincali’ for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, as though he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:—