he finished _Lavengro_ (1851), and wrote _The Romany Rye_ (1857), _Wild
Wales_ (1862), and _Romano Lavo-Lil_: _the Word-Book of the Romany_
(1874). For a time Borrow had a house in London in Hereford Square,
where his wife died in 1869. He died himself at Oulton in August 1881,
leaving behind him, so it is frequently asserted, many manuscript
volumes, including treatises on Celtic poetry, on Welsh and Cornish and
Manx literature, as well as translations from the Norse and Russ and the
jest-books of Turkey. Some, at all events, of these works were
advertised as 'ready for the press' in 1858.

_The Bible in Spain_ was a popular book, and in 1843, the year of its
publication, its author, a man of striking appearance, was much feted and
regarded by the lion-hunters of the period. Borrow did not take kindly
to the den. He was full of inbred suspicions and, perhaps, of
unreasonable demands. He resented the confinement of the dinner-table,
the impalement of the ball-room, the imprisonment of the pew. Like the
lion in Browning's poem, 'The Glove'--

You saw by the flash on his forehead,
By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
He was leagues in the desert already,
Driving the flocks up the mountain.

He began to write _Lavengro_ in London in 1843. His thoughts went back
to his old friend Petulengro, who pronounced life to be sweet: 'There's
night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother,
all sweet things. There's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very
sweet, brother; who would wish to die?' Yes, or to live cribbed,
cabined, and confined in a London square! No wonder 'Lavengro' felt
cross and uncomfortable. Nor did he take much pleasure in the society of
the other lions of the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John
Bowring, M.P. Was not Bowring 'Lavengro' as much as Borrow himself? Had
he not--for there was no end to his impudence--travelled in Spain, and
actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular? Was he not meditating
translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not,
furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his
wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers
of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to 'Charley o'er the
Waterism'? Borrow did not get on with Bowring.

When Borrow shook the dust of London off his feet, and returned into
Norfolk with _Lavengro_ barely begun on hi