sweetness and the fascination and the authenticity of the autobiographic form and the breadth and variety of the historic form. To bring into an autobiographic narrative the complex and wide-spreading net that forms the story of “Bleak House” was, of course, impossible, and so he mixed up the chapters of Esther Summerson’s autobiographic narrative with chapters of the history of the great Chancery suit and all that flowed from it. In order to minimize as much as possible the confusion of so very confused a scheme as this, he wrote the historic part of the book in the present tense; and the result is the most oppressively-laboured novel that was ever produced by a great novelist. I have dwelt at length upon this subject because if I were asked to name one of the greatest masters of the autobiographic form, in any language, I should, I think, have to name Borrow. In one variety of that form he gave us “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” in the other, “Wild Wales.” V WHY ARE THE WELSH GYPSIES IGNORED IN “WILD WALES”? “Wild Wales” seems to have disappointed Borrovians because it ignores the Welsh gypsies, the most superior branch of all the Romany race, except, perhaps, the gypsy musicians of Hungary. And certainly it is curious to speculate as to why he ignores them in that fashion. Readers of “The Romany Rye” wonder why, after his adventure with Mrs. Herne and her granddaughter, and his rescue by the Welshman, Peter Williams, on reaching the Welsh border, Borrow kept his mouth closed. Several reasons have occurred to me, one of which is that his knowledge of Welsh Romany was of the shakiest kind. Another reason might have been that in “The Romany Rye,” as much of his story as could be told in two volumes being told, he abruptly broke off as he had broken off at the end of the third volume of “Lavengro.” Or did the same reason that caused him to write, in “Wild Wales,” an autobiographic narrative without any of the fantasies and romantic ornamentation which did so much to win popularity for his previous books, govern him when he decided to ignore the gypsies—the presence of his wife and stepdaughter? There is a very wide class, including indeed the whole of British Philistia, that cherishes a positive racial aversion to the Romany—an aversion as strong as the Russian aversion to the Jew.