These, together with the poems which we have already quoted, may serve to show the extent of his power beyond the sphere of his personal experiences. But the strains which will touch other hearts most deeply are those which describe or allude to the troubles and struggles of his own. In conversation or correspondence with his friends he was no mendicant for condolence, and had no pleasure in being pitied. He presented a manly front to society, and would carry his burden alone. Yet he had a deep craving for sympathy in his heart, and his muse was the confidante to whom he unbosomed his private sorrows. Hence, in his note-books, fly-leaves, and occasional poems, suggested by the occurrences of the day, we find frequent allusions, more or less direct, to his own spiritual or worldly anxieties, which are in the highest degree affecting. To him, in a sense more literal than Wordsworth meant "The meanest flower that blows could give Thoughts that did often lie too deep for tears." "When the pure snowdrops couch beneath the snow, And storms long tarrying come too soon at last, He sees the semblance of his private woe, And tells it to the dilatory blast.” And when he meets with an anemone surviving amid the autumnal rains, he sees in it an image of the faith or purity of his youth, still living amid the ruins of so many hopes; and falls into this beautiful meditation : "Who would have thought a thing so slight, What power was given thee to outlast Adorning latest autumn with We are told that all these poems were thrown off with great rapidity-that a sonnet rarely took him more than ten minutes-and that he seldom altered them afterwards. If so, we cannot be surprised to find them very unequal in point of execution; especially when we remember that the selection was not made by himself. Some of them we should suppose to be only beginnings, and others he would probably have put aside as abortions. But, taken with the allowance due to things posthumous and fragmentary, they are almost all interesting, and a very large proportion excellent. We had intended to give samples of each variety; but we have not found room for above half the extracts which we had marked. 66 SINCE the days of "Waverley Novels," no an- " Single-speech Hamilton" was probably wise in nouncement of a book has excited more expecta- his generation. He secured his sudden fame by tion than Mr. Murray's repeated advertisements of his subsequent silence. Many sapient critics, thirty Lavengro." For many months previous to its years ago, declared that the then "great unknown" appearance its title was entered on the list of most had exhausted his genius in "Waverley ;" and the public and circulating libraries; and the expectant public generally was much coyer in its reception reader was half inclined to quarrel with the pub- of the "Antiquary" and "Guy Mannering" than in lisher or the author for its tardiness in forthcoming. its welcome of the earliest of these immortal tales. "The Bible in Spain" had implanted, both in those who deemed it fact and in those who suspected it to be fiction, a lively curiosity respecting the earlier life of its adventurous author. Whether the reception of "Lavengro" has quite answered these expectations, it is perhaps premature to decide. Next to gaining a reputation, an author's greatest difficulty is to maintain one. Readers, indeed, are not on their guard against a first assault of genius; but they are armed against a second volley from the same battery. "The Bible in Spain" has, in some degree, acted unfavourably upon "Lavengro." The latter work happens to be not exactly what the public had been expecting its censors have had time to furbish their weapons; and the adventures of the * Lavengro: The Scholar-the Gipsy-the Priest. By George Borrow. 3 vols. London: Murray, ment. "Scholar, the Gipsy, and the Priest," have conse- farthest horizon of the past, are disconnected from quently been greeted less cordially, and apparently contemporary acts and emotions; and thus recaused, at least for the present, some disappoint- semble the scenery of dreams, in which the separate links of reality are connected and coloured by imaginative accessories. To the man, indeed, childhood is little more than a dream. He exag gerates its happiness; he imperfectly remembers its infelicities; he recalls its days rather than its seasons; and when he attempts to re-unite its intervals and fragments, his fancy rather than his memory aids him in the process of re-construction. In every record of a man's life the introductory chapters are more or less dreamlike. We shall not begin our notice of "Lavengro," as so many of our contemporaries have done, by describing it as "a remarkable book." Of its claim to that epithet the most cursory reader may convince himself in a few minutes; while the attentive and thoughtful reader will consider the term trivial or inappropriate. We shall, on the contrary, endeavour to delineate the work itself before we attempt to define its scope and character; and, for the present, merely express our conviction -a conviction which we shall justify by frequent extracts from their pages-that the volumes now before us need in no respect derogate from Mr. Borrow's previous reputation. We can, indeed, detect in them more than one cause of inferior popularity. They do not possess the adventitious attractions of foreign scenery and adventure; they do not respond to certain questions which many "gentle," but curious, "readers" were prepared to ask. They are not connected with the interests and operations of a large central body, like the Bible Society; and they are as much the record of a mind as of moving accidents by flood or field. The public, in short, had been looking for a second Marco Polo, and have been presented, instead, with a nineteenth-century De Foe. Such are some of the immediate impediments to the popularity of "Lavengro." A phrase, or rather a word in its preface, has perhaps given rise to further objections or distrust. Mr. Borrow designates his present work as a dream of study and adventure;" and the word dream, admitting of wide interpretation, and not having been, as we think, in this instance, rightly interpreted, has induced many persons to believe the narrative to be wholly imaginative, or that, at least, it deals indiscriminately with fact and fiction. Indeed, more than one of Mr. Borrow's recent critics have complained that now he has pitched his gipsies' tent upon debateable ground, and that the facts, if facts they be, are disguised by embellishment, while the fiction is incumbered by some lingering shackles of reality. We believe, however, these objections to rest upon a misconception of the author's meaning in his employment of the word "dream." Mr. Borrow weighs his words well, and has, in our opinion, used the term advisedly. In fact, with the purpose he had in view, we do not see that he could have chosen a more exact or expressive word. We are far, however, from distrusting the memory of manhood, when it reverts to the scenes and sources of its first impressions. The virgintablets of the mind are the most susceptible, capacious, and retentive. Facts are imbedded, feelings stamped indelibly, and words, even casual words are traced upon the brain of childhood in characters of fire, which, even in senescence, lose none of their force or brilliance, but rise as vividly from their mental nooks as if only yesterday had garnered them there. Our life, indeed, is rounded with dreams, and the hues on its eastern horizon are visible long after the day has begun to decline. We do not, therefore, ascribe to the word "dream," in Mr. Borrow's preface, any meaning incompatible with a certain reality in the adventures or with the essential veracity of "Lavengro." But it is neither, strictly speaking, an autobiography nor a book of travels. It partakes of the nature of both, but it aims at something higher and more comprehensive than either. In the first place it describes the formative causes and the progressive stages of its author's mind; and in the next it traces some of those by-currents of life which rather accompany than aggrandise the main social stream. Mr. Borrow has studied man and acquired the speech of man in unusual scenes and in rarely-frequented schools, at the bridge-foot and on the moorland, beside great waters and in wooded dingles, in the hubbub of the market and in the silence of plains. His pictures are symbolic daguerreotypes. They represent living scenes; but they also suggest much more than they represent. His gipsies, his Armenians, his Jews, his Methodists, his tinkers, his landlords, and his bruisers are representative men. Their language suggests to him philological speculations; their habits furnish him with ethnological and physiological hints; their virtues and their vices equally point to many unrecorded social phenomena. "Lavengro" is, in short, a species of poetic drama, which combines the veracity of Hogarth with the visions of Bunyan. For "Lavengro" begins from the beginning, from the place of birth and the parish-register. It traces from earliest infancy the awakening and the growth The scene of "Lavengro" is laid in England, of the author's mind, as well as the accidents which Scotland, and Ireland, but principally in the determined or modified his singular career. Cir- former; and the time in which it is enacted is 66 'Let no cumstances are accordingly mentioned in its the first quarter of the present century. pages, conversations recorded, scenes described, one be displeased or disappointed," says this and characters analysed, of which, from their date, staunch champion of John Bullism, or rather of the author himself can have retained only a most dim recollection, even when he has not derived his information wholly from the reports of others. Such reminiscences, however imbibed, float on the the normal Anglo-Teuton, "that the scene of action lies in the British islands, inasmuch as there are no countries in the world less known by the British than these same British islands, or where more strange things are every day occurring, | after-life. Ere he had attained his fourteenth year, whether in road or street, house or dingle." We Lavengro had followed the stout captain of militia are glad to greet in Mr. Borrow a fellow-labourer over Northumbrian moorland, over Scottish heather, in the social field; for we, too, although for over Irish causeways, and had beheld “many men different purposes, have often endeavoured to de- and many cities," and strange scenes and forms of pict the unobserved and unobtrusive nooks of country or suburban life. Where the regiment English life. For studies of this kind Mr. Bor- remained long enough in quarters, Lavengro was row's opportunities have been, perhaps, unsur- duly sent to such grammar-schools as the town passed. Goldsmith was not better acquainted with afforded; but when, as often chanced, it was enGrub-street, nor Howard with gaols, than Lavengro camped in the summer-months, he seems to have with the English peasants and with world-wan- been left to his own devices for amusement or inderers of every kind, from those who are pent up struction. And as regarded his future career, he in the alleys and court-yards of cities to those who was singularly fortunate in his adventures, and house, without owning allegiance to tax-gatherer made the best use of them. The peace of 1815, or overseer, beneath "the brave o'erarching canopy indeed, put an end to Lavengro's wanderings for a of heaven." Lavengro, or the " Word-master"-for time, and he was consigned to the desk and stool such, gentle reader, is the import of the name of an attorney's office in Norwich. But although acquired in very early life the only key which will he resolutely copied drafts and deeds, he acquired effectually open to the student of life the tent of little law, and the captain of militia likened his the wanderer. He learned the language of the erratic son to a recruit who, disliking the manual inhabitants thereof, was taken into their counsels, and platoon exercise, should leave the ranks and and more than once might, had he pleased, have go vapouring about alone without orders. The been adopted into their tribes. His skill in the old disciplinarian was, indeed, greatly disconcerted dialects of the various races who make up the sum by the linguistic and erratic propensities of his son. of the population of the British isles enabled the What prodigy is this that I have hatched?" he Word-master to domesticate himself indifferently pondered in himself. "I sent him to school to with Celt and Saxon, with the fair-haired descend- learn Greek, and he picks up Irish; I bind him ants of the Danes, and with the tawny and dark-apprentice to the most formal of professions, and eyed people who are in all countries without be- he associates with gipsies; I and all my kin are longing to any, and to pourtray them as they strict Church-people, and his bosom friend is a clustered round their camp-fires or held rude colloquy in village inns. To his associates-and many strange associates he meets with-Lavengro appeared as one of themselves; they trusted him, they were proud of him, they feasted and sometimes fought with him. But he watched and has chronicled their deeds and words in his character of the "Scholar," and he brought to the task of observation a mind at once untrammelled by social prejudices, and enlightened and informed with sound and various knowledge. The Word-master was, in some respects, a bookish man; at least, he appears to have been early and deeply versed in those portions of literature which most immediately reflect the genius of races. Homer, Dante, the Edda, the Welsh bard, Ab-Guilym, and the Scandinavian scalds were diligently studied by him at an age when most lads are composing themes and verses in language which "would make Quintilian stare and gasp." Lavengro's childhood, although far removed from stricken fields, was passed amid some of the pomp and circumstance of war. His father, after serving for many years in the line, and facing "war in procinet" at Minden and "on other grounds," became a captain of militia, and was employed in training the rustic levies for rougher work abroad. The daily drill, the constant spectacle of stalwart forms, and the picturesque accompaniments of camp-life, the very spirit of the time-a time of stern resolve and stirring preparation-the undefined sense, even in the mind of childhood, of a mighty struggle in act or expectation, were all of them powerful stimulants to a meditative yet fearless boy. The frequent changes of the paternal home nurtured also the wandering impulse of his certain free-thinking philosopher, who has taught him German and all manner of heresies to boot." With the death of the veteran soldier, full of years, and, indeed, of honours also, closes the first act of the life-drama of Lavengro. Thenceforward he became a wanderer; for, with the exception of an experimental period of vassalage to London publishers, and a trial of the ills" which the scholar's life assail," he abandoned the shelter of roofs and the security of streets for tents, and strange companions, and solitary places. Even in cities, however, Lavengro meets with adventures which confirm his native impulses towards travelling and philology. And of the poetry which lurks or displays itself in city-life he was a thoughtful observer, and is an accurate describer. He saves a merchant on his way to 'Change from robbery. The merchant was an Armenian, and becomes Lavengro's friend; the baffled pickpocket becomes also, soon afterwards, his acquaintance. His conversation with the latter, who had given up thieving and taken to the pea and thimble, is reported in the very spirit of De Foe. As a literary adventurer, Lavengro is not fortunate. The publishers would not look at his translations of "Ab Guilym, or the Ancient Songs of Denmark," from which, in his youthful ardour, he had expected immediate fame and profit; and his only patron, a more unconscionable and less tractable ruffian than even the wild men of the camp, set him to compile the lives of highwaymen, to do taskwork for a Review which no one read, and to translate into German an incomprehensible system of philosophy. From this bondage, which wore the strong man down, Lavengro escapes by writing for a more humane bookseller an imaginary biography, entitled the "Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, the great | lating to the Zincali. "Lavengro" is equally fertile Traveller." Our limits prohibit us from entering upon the third portion of Lavengro's adventures-his life in the woodland and the moorland. This omission we believe to be the less material because we are convinced that no one who begins these volumes in a right spirit, and with a proper clue to their intent, will close them without regret or without frequent perusal of their more remarkable chapters. In the preceding remarks we have endeavoured to afford such a clue, to answer sundry superficial objections to Mr. Borrow's narrative, and to point out what we believe to be the real character of his work. "The Scholar, the Gipsy, and the Priest" is a poem wanting, indeed, the accompaniment of verse, but possessing all the other attributes of an imaginative work of a high order. Fact and fancy, indeed, interpenetrate one another like the hues of shot-silk. Where actual scenes and persons are described, Lavengro adheres to his original with scrupulous veracity. He is giving evidence upon strange yet serious matters, and he permits himself no license of invention. When, on the other hand, the purposes of his work demand a normal, rather than a special exposition of races, principles, or social phenomena, his imagination knows no other law than the law of harmony and probability-the law which regulates the Edipus of Sophocles, the Vision of Dante, the Weird Sisters and the fairy people of Macbeth and the Midsummer Night's Dream, and the Witch Sabbath in Faust. To discredit the reality of "Lavengro" because of its imaginative accessories, to overlook the imaginative accessories because of their marriage with fact, is a kind of criticism which would reject Shakspeare's historical plays because they contain some passages from Hall's Chronicle, or the Divina Comedia because it alludes to events and depicts characters familiar to every Florentine of the fourteenth century. We shall now briefly revert to the introductory chapters of Lavengro's adventures; not because we think them the best portion of these volumes, but because they especially contain the formative causes of their author's remarkable mind and career. And as many of the scenes and some of the persons described are familiarly known to us, we are enabled to vouch for the conscientious fidelity of Mr. Borrow's pencil in describing them. Two races, from a very early period of his life, powerfully attracted his imagination, and materially affected his studies and his fortunes. These races are the ancient Danes and the modern gipsies. Of the elder Scandinavian bards Mr. Borrow has been a diligent student, and is an unrivalled translator, as we trust he will shortly prove to the world; while his researches into the speech and habits of the Zincali are adopted both in Denmark and in Germany as the basis and text-book of investigation into the past history and social condition of that singular race. So far, indeed, are foreign scholars from regarding either of Mr. Borrow's former works as romances that they consult them for statistics, and derive from them some of their most important inferences upon all questions re in social disclosures; and when it has been thoroughly enjoyed as a work of imagination, may, on many important topics, be safely consulted as a Blue-Book of Reports. Mr. Borrow was attracted to the Danes by an adventure in earliest childhood. "We were," he says, "if I remember right, in the vicinity of a place called Hythe, in Kent. One sweet evening, in the latter part of summer, our mother took her two little boys by the hand for a wander about the fields. In the course of our stroll we came to the village church. An old, grey-headed sexton stood in the porch, who, perceiving that we were strangers, invited us to enter. We were presently in the interior, wandering about the aisles, looking on the walls, and inspecting the monuments of the notable dead. I can scarcely state what we saw; how should I? I was a child not yet four years old, and yet I think I remember the evening sun streaming in through a stained window upon the dingy mahogany pulpit, and flinging a rich lustre upon the faded tints of an ancient banner. And now once more we were outside the building, where, against the wall, stood a low-eaved pent-house, into which we looked. It was half-filled with substances of some kind, which at first looked like large grey stones. The greater part were lying in layers; some, however, were seen in confused and mouldering heaps, and two or three, which had perhaps rolled down from the rest, lay separately on the floor. Skulls, madam,' said the sexton; skulls of the old Danes! Long ago they came pirating into these parts; and then there chanced a mighty shipwreck; for God was angry with them, and he sunk them, and their skulls, as they came ashore, were placed here as a memorial. There were many more when I was young, but now they are fast disappearing. Some of them must have belonged to strange fellows, madam. Only see that one; why the two young gentry can scarcely lift it! And, indeed, my brother and myself had entered the golgotha, and commenced handling these grim relics of mortality. One enormous skull, lying in a corner, had fixed our attention, and we had drawn it forth. Spirit of eld, what a skull was yon! "I still seem to see it, the huge, grim thing! Many of the others were large, strikingly so, and appeared fully to justify the old man's conclusion, that their owners must have been strange fellows; but, compared with this mighty mass of bone, they looked small and diminutive like those of pigmies. It must have belonged to a giant, one of those redhaired warriors of whose strength and stature such wondrous tales are told in the ancient chronicles of the north, and whose grave-hills, when ransacked, occasionally reveal secrets which fill the minds of puny moderns with astonishment and awe. Reader, have you ever pored days and nights over the pages of Snorro? Probably not, for he wrote in a language which few of the present day understand, and few would be tempted to read him tamed down by Latin dragomars. A brave old book is that of Snorro, containing the histories and adventures of old northern kings and champions, who seemed to have been quite different men, if we may judge from the feats which they performed, from those of these days. One of the best of his histories is that which describes the life of Harold Haardraade, who, after manifold adventures by land and sea, now a pirate, now a mercenary of the Greek emperor, became King of Norway, and eventually perished at the battle of Stanford Bridge, whilst he was engaged in a gallant onslaught upon England. 66 Now, I have often thought that the old Kemp whose mouldering skull in the golgotha of Hythe my brother and myself could scarcely lift, must have resembled, in one respect at least, this Harold, whom Snorro describes as a great and wise ruler, and a determined leader, dangerous in battle, of fair presence, and measuring in height just five ells, neither more nor less. "I never forgot the Daneman's skull. Like the apparition of the viper in the sandy lane, it dwelt in the mind of the boy, affording copious food for the exercise of imagination. From that moment with the name of Dane were associated strange ideas of strength, daring, and superhuman stature; and an undefinable curiosity for all that is connected with the Danish race began to pervade me. And if, long after, when I became a student I devoted myself with peculiar zest to Danish lore and the acquirement of the Norse tongue and its dialects, I can only explain the matter by the early impression received at Hythe from the tale of the old sexton beneath the pent-house, and the sight of the Danish skull." Years afterwards, when Lavengro was an attorney's clerk, a strange uncouth-looking volume came into his possession, and ripened the seed thus fortuitously sown in the Danish golgotha. It was a book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and champions, and men of huge stature, which from time immemorial had been sung in the north, and early in the seventeenth century had been collected by one Anders Videl, an assistant of Tycho Brahe's, in the observatory on the islet of Hveen. neither grammar nor dictionary of the language, and when I sought for them could procure neither, and I was much dispirited; till suddenly a bright thought came into my head, and I said, Although I cannot obtain a dictionary or grammar, I can perhaps obtain a Bible in this language; and if I can procure a Bible I can learn the language, for the Bible in every tongue contains the same thing, and I have only to compare the words of the Danish Bible with those of the English, and, if I persevere, I shall in time acquire the language of the Danes; and I was pleased with the thought, which I considered to be a bright one, and I no longer bit my lips, or tore my hair, but I took my hat, and, going forth, I flung my hat into the air.” We cannot omit the following portrait of a French emigré and language-master, such as he appeared five-and-thirty years ago : He was "It was a tessara-glot grammar-a strange old book, printed somewhere in Holland, which pretended to be an easy guide to the acquirement of the French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English tongues, by means of which anyone conversant in any one of those languages could make himself master of the other three. I turned my attention to the French and Italian. The old book was not of much value; I derived some benefit from it, however, and, conning it intensely, at the end of a few weeks obtained some insight into the structure of these two languages. At length I had learned all that the book was capable of informing me, yet was still far from the goal to which it had promised to conduct me. 'I wish I had a master! I exclaimed; and the master was at hand. In an old court of an old town lived a certain elderly personage, perhaps sixty, or thereabouts. rather tall, and something of a robust make, with a countenance in which bluffness was singularly blended with vivacity and grimace; and with a complexion which would have been ruddy but for a yellow hue which rather predominated. His dress consisted of a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons, the former evidently seldom subjected to "And now," Mr. Borrow proceeds, "I had in the annoyance of a brush, and the latter exhibitmy possession a Danish book, which, from its ap- ing here and there spots of something which, if pearance, might be supposed to have belonged to not grease, bore a strong resemblance to it; add to the very old Danes indeed; but how was I to turn these articles an immense frill, seldom of the purest it to any account? I had the book, it is true, but white, but invariably of the finest French cambric, I did not understand the language; and how was and you have some idea of his dress. He had I to overcome that difficulty? Hardly by poring rather a remarkable stoop; but his step was rapid over the book, yet I did pore over the book, daily and vigorous, and, as he hurried along the streets, and nightly, till my eyes were dim; and it ap- he would glance to the right and left with a pair peared to me that every now and then I encoun- of big eyes, like plums, and on recognising anyone tered words which I understood-English words, would exalt a pair of grizzled eyebrows, and though strangely disguised; and I said to myself, slightly kiss a tawny and ungloved hand. At Courage! English and Danish are cognate dialects, a time will come when I shall understand Danish. And then I pored over the book again, but with all my poring I could not understand it; and then I became angry, and I bit my lips till the blood came, and I occasionally tore a handful from my hair, and flung it upon the floor. But that did not mend the matter, for still I did not understand the book, which, however, I began to see was written in rhyme-a circumstance rather difficult to discover at first. . . . But I toiled in vain, for I had certain hours of the day he might be seen entering the doors of female boarding-schools, generally with a book in his hand, and perhaps another just peering from the orifice of a capacious backpocket; and at a certain season of the year he might be seen, dressed in white, before the altar of a certain small Popish chapel, chanting from the breviary in very intelligible Latin, or perhaps reading from the desk in utterly unintelligible English. Such was my preceptor in the French and Italian tongues. 'Exul sacerdos; vone banished |