26th, 1881, after years spent in a strange seclusion at Oulton, tended latterly by his step-daughter Henrietta, George Borrow was found dead in his bed, dying as he had lived, alone.  Not long after his death, which took place when he was seventy-eight, Borrow’s Oulton home was pulled down.  All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the old summer-house in which he wrote Lavengro, and the ragged fir-trees that sighed the requiem of his last hours.  Without appealing to “the shires,” but in the Eastern counties alone, he has been commemorated since his death by such writers as Henry Dutt, and Whitwell Elwin, by Egmont Hake, by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and by Dr. Jessopp.  And now ere the close of the century {40} it has fallen to the lot of yet another East Anglian to place a small stone upon the cairn of George Borrow.

II.

The two books Lavengro and Romany Rye are in reality one work, an unfinished autobiography, commenced upon a moderate and quite feasible scale; but after about a third of the ground is covered the scale is enormously increased, the narrative, encumbered by a vast amount of detail, makes less and less progress, and finally stops short, without any obvious, but rather a lame and impotent conclusion, at chapter xlvii. of the Romany Rye, or chapter cxlvii. of the work considered as one whole.  The disproportion of the scale will be sufficiently indicated when we point out that the first twenty-two years of the author’s life are treated pretty equally in fifty-seven chapters (i. to lvii.).  The remaining ninety chapters (lviii. to cxlvii.) are wholly taken up by the incidents of less than four months, the four summer months of 1825.  The first twenty-two years of the author’s life are far from commonplace.  The interest is well sustained, but is seldom intense,—­at no point is the author’s memory sufficiently teeming to cause an overflow; but with the conclusion of his sojourn in London, May 22nd, 1825, commences an itinerant life, the novelty of which graves every incident in the most vivid possible manner upon the writer’s recollection.  With his emancipation from town life a new graphic impulse is developed.  Borrow seizes a new palette and sets to work with fresher colours upon a stupendous canvas.  This canvas may be described as taking the form of a triptych.  In the first compartment we have the first sensations of the roadfarer’s life and some minor adventures:  a visit to Stonehenge; the strange meeting with a returned convict, who turns out to be the old applewoman’s son; the vignette of the hostelry, with the figures of the huge fat landlord and the handmaid Jenny; the visit to the stranger gentleman who protects himself by “touching” against evil chance; the interview with the Rev. Mr. Platitude, and the bargain struck with the travelling tinker, Jack Slingsby, whose stock-in-trade and profession the writer determines