Take the Isopel Berners episode. Whether Isopel Berners was a fiction of the imagination or a character in real life matters not for my purpose. At any rate the episode, his friendship with this Anglo-Saxon girl of the road, is one of the distinctive features of both _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_. The attitude of Borrow towards her may safely be regarded as a clear indication of the man’s character. A girl of fine physical presence and many engaging qualities such as were bound to attract a man of Borrow’s type, who had forsaken her friends to throw in her lot with this fellow-wanderer on the road. Here were the ready elements of a romance—of a friendship that should burn up with the consuming power of love the baser elements of self in the man’s disposition, and transform his nature. And what does he do? He accepts her companionship, just as he might have accepted the companionship of one of his landlords or ostlers; spends the time he lived with her in the Dingle in teaching her Armenian, and when at last, driven to desperation by his calculating coldness, she comes to take farewell of him, he makes her a perfunctory offer of marriage, which she, being a girl of fine mettle as well as of strong affection, naturally declines. She leaves him, and after a few passages of philosophic regret, he passes on to the next adventure. Now Borrow, as we know, was not physically drawn towards the ordinary gypsy type—the dark, beautiful Celtic women; and it was in girls of the fair Saxon order such as Isopel Berners that he sought a natural mate. Certainly, if any woman was calculated by physique and by disposition to attract Borrow, Isopel Berners was that woman. And when we find that the utmost extent of his passion is to make tea for her and instruct her in Armenian, it is impossible not to be disagreeably impressed by the unnatural chilliness of such a disposition. Not even Isopel could break down the barrier of intense egoism that fenced him off from any profound intimacy with his fellow-creatures. Perhaps Dr. Jessop’s attack upon him errs in severity, and is to an extent, as Mr. Watts-Dunton says, “unjust”; but there is surely an element of truth in his remarks when he says: “Of anything like animal passion there is not a trace in all his many volumes. Not a hint that he ever kissed a woman or even took a little child upon his knee.” Nor do I think that the anecdote which Mr. Watts-Dunton relates about the beautiful gypsy, to whom Borrow read Arnold’s poem, goes far to dissipate the impression of Borrow’s insensibility to a woman’s charm.