From the general public came a fusillade of requests to solve the prevailing mystery of the book.  Was it fact or fiction?—­or, if fact and fiction were blended, in what proportions?  Borrow ought to have been prepared for a question so natural in the mouths of literary busy-bodies at any time, and especially at a time when partisan spirit was rampant, and the vitality of the lampoon as a factor in politics so far from extinct.  To show his contempt alike for the critical verdict and the popular curiosity, after a quarrel, or at least a sharp coolness with John Murray, he published in two volumes, in May 1857, The Romany Rye, which carries on the story of Lavengro for just about a month further, namely, down towards the end of August 1825, and there again stops dead.  Whether we regard coherence or the rate of progress, no more attempt at amendment is perceptible than can be discerned in the later as compared with the earlier volumes of Tristram Shandy.  The peculiarities of the earlier volume are, indeed, here accentuated, while the Author had evidently only been confirmed by the lapse of years in the political philosophy to which he had already given expression.  At the end was printed an appendix (a sort of catalogue raisonne of Borrovian prejudices), satirising with unmeasured bitterness the critics of Lavengro.

The resumption of a story after an interval of over six years, with appendages so extravagant, whether we regard their tenor or their length, and with an indifference so sublime to the popular desire that he should get along with his personal narrative, was hardly calculated to conciliate critical opinion; but it had one capital effect.  It drew from Whitwell Elwin, himself a Norfolk man, and a literary critic of the widest grasp and knowledge, this remarkable testimony:  that far from exaggerating such incidents as were drawn from his own experience (not a few, as he himself could verify), Borrow’s descriptions were rather within the truth than beyond it.  “However picturesquely they may be drawn, the lines are invariably those of nature. . . .  There can be no doubt that the larger part, and possibly the whole of the work, is a narrative of actual occurrences.”

Here, then, is the heart of the mystery, or of the mystery that is apparent; the phenomenon is due primarily to the fact that Borrow’s book is so abnormally true as regards the matter, while in manner of presentation it is so strikingly original.  There are superficial traces, no doubt, of not a few writers of the eighteenth century.  In some of his effects Borrow reproduces Sterne:  essentially Sternean, for instance, is the interview between the youthful author and the experienced Mr. Taggart.

   “Well, young gentleman,” said Taggart to me one morning when we
   chanced to be alone, a few days after the affair of cancelling, “how
   do you like authorship?”

   “I scarcely call authorship the drudgery I am engaged in,” said I.