settles with his own stock-in-trade as tinker and blacksmith at the foot of the dingle hard by Mumper’s Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire; here at the end of June 1825 takes place the classical encounter between the philologer and the flaming tinman—­all this, is it not related in Lavengro, and substantiated with much hard labour of facts and dates by Dr. W. I. Knapp in his exhaustive biography of George Borrow?  The allurement of his genius is such that the etymologist shall leave his roots and the philologer his Maeso-Gothic to take to the highway and dwell in the dingle with “Don Jorge.”

Lavengro’s triumph over the flaming tinman is the prelude to what Professor Saintsbury justly calls “the miraculous episode of Ysopel Berners,” and the narrative of the author’s life is thence continued, with many digressions, but with a remarkable fidelity to fact as far as the main issue is concerned, until the narrative, though not the life-story of the author, abruptly terminates at Horncastle, in August 1825.  There follows what is spoken of as the veiled period of Borrow’s life, from 1826 to 1833.

The years in which we drift are generally veiled from posterity.  The system of psychometry carried to such perfection by Obermann and Amiel could at no time have been exactly congenial to Borrow, who spoke of himself at this period as “digging holes in the sand and filling them up again.”  Roughly speaking, the years appear to have been spent comparatively uneventfully, for the most part in Norfolk.  In December 1832 he walked to London to interview the British and Foreign Bible Society, covering a hundred and twelve miles in twenty-seven hours on less than sixpennyworth of food and drink.  He was thirty years old at the time, and the achievement was the pride of his remaining years.  Six months later, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, he managed to get on the paid staff of the Society, to the bewilderment of Norwich “friends,” who were inclined to be ironical on the subject of the transformation of the chum of hanged Thurtell and the disciple of godless Billy Taylor into a Bible missionary.  In July 1833, then, Borrow sets out on his Eastern travels as the accredited agent of the Bible Society, goes to St. Petersburg, “the finest city in the world,” and obtains the Russian imprimatur for a Manchu version of that suspicious novelty, the Bible.  He carried this scheme into execution to the general satisfaction, and he returns to London in 1837; then to the south of Europe, whence he reappears, larger than life and twice as natural, in his masterly autobiographical romance of The Bible in Spain, the work which made his name, which was sold by thousands, which was eagerly acclaimed as an invaluable addition to “Sunday” literature, and pirated in a generous spirit of emulation by American publishers.

We are now come to the circumstance of the composition of Lavengro. The Bible in Spain, when it appeared in 1843, implied a wonderful background to the Author’s experience, a career diversified by all kinds of wild adventures, “sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles,” gipsies, prisons,—­what you will. {12}