{330} “Good.”

{337} The next time the compassionate word-master visited the landlord, he found him a ‘down pin’ no longer, but the centre of an adulatory crowd.  The way in which he surmounted the sea of troubles that beset him is described with much humour in The Romany Rye (chap. xvii).  The main factors in his relief were (1) Strong ale, taken by the advice of Lavengro, which leads to Catchpole knocking down the radical, Hunter, and winning back the admiration of the tap-room, (2) a loan from the parson of Willenhall, who wished to save a muscular fellow-Protestant from the clutches of the man in black.  The brewer now became very civil, a coach was appointed to stop at the inn, and, in short, Catchpole is left by Lavengro riding upon the summit of the wave of popularity and good fortune.

{343} Jacobus Villotte, his Dictionarium Latino-Armenium, Rome, 1714.

{348} And this, alas! is the last glimpse we are to have of Isopel Berners, a heroine whose like we shall scarce encounter again in the whole wide world of romance.  Charles Kingsley says of her, indeed, that she is far too good not to be true.  The likeness is undoubtedly a masterpiece, yet, though Borrow has drawn the outline firmly, he leaves much for the imagination to fill in.  Languid indeed must be the imagination that can fail to be stimulated by Borrow’s outline of his Brynhilda.  Cast in the mould of Britannia, queen, however, not of the waves but of the woodland, poor yet noble, and innocent of every mean ambition of gentility, faithful, valiant, and proud,—­as she stands pale and commanding, in the sunshine at the dingle’s mouth, in all her virginal dignity, is she not a figure worthy to rank with the queens of Beauty and Romance, with Dido “with a willow in her hand,” with the deeply-loving Rebecca as with a calm and tender dignity she bids for ever adieu to the land of Wilfred of Ivanhoe?

{361} After the receipt of this letter three nights elapsed, and then the word-master himself left the dingle for the last time.  The third night he spent alone in his encampment “in a very melancholy manner, with little or no sleep, thinking of Isopel Berners; and in the morning when I quitted the place, I shed several tears, as I reflected that I should probably never again see the spot where I had passed so many hours in her company.”