One of his greatest admirers confesses that like his master, Defoe, Borrow could He magnificently. It was this uncertainty as to whether the books were fact coloured by imagination, or fancy masquerading as fact that chiefly caused them to fare so badly with their reviewers. 'To-day we care less which predommates. We are carried away by the originality, the vividness, the humanity, the wholesomeness of these experiences. Rural England of the early 19th century' uunrolls before us—the England of highways and Janes; with great old inns, fat landlords and perky hhostlers;, gypsies and vagabonds, pugitists and highwaymen; the saintly Welsh preacher with his wife, end the wild and hairy murderes, the gypsy Mrs. Hearne and her evil grandavghter; the man "ho taught himself Chinese by the inscriptions on tea pots and vases; the man who cured his insomnia by reading the poems of Wordsworth; our old friend Jasper Petulevgro and his companions; and last but firet in cheer power of jereation, the Flaming Tinman with his mort and the tragic Isabel Berniers, enormous of stature, and more than a match for a man with her fists, tender and pitying for the injured Lavengzo, most pitiable and yet leet asking for pity of the rear heroines of our fiction. She appears for only a hundred pages in each of the two books. Yet so vividly iv the story told that she remains one of the great creations, and one of the first literary critics of our time has called her the most 'To the making of this man went many factors, He had the neces sary heredity. His father vame of sod Corwish' stock and spent his Life as a soldier during the stirring Napoleonic era, in the Coldstream Guarda, though he never saw ser-oad. He was a deeply re-ing were not absolutely incompat Die, His mother was a farmer's siaugtiter, with come ambitions of hor own, She appeared on the stage of a country hall aa a supernumerary in @ company of players, where Thomas Borrow fell in love with her pretty face, and married her. She proved a woman of principle, an ideal mate for the burly guards: mat and mother for the strange, ady, roving genius of a son.
For the first 20 years of his life our cltiet., authority is his twin masterpiece, "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye." It has long been a pleasant debate among critics when thor these books are more fiction or more autobiography. It has become abundantly clear, however, that in the main ¢hey' hold very closely to facts,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.