fighting-men amongst the
gipsies. They were to him the leaders of the old spirit of English
aggressiveness, and as such he revered them. His pen was always ready to
defend a straightforward bruiser, with whom, he contended, the Roman
gladiator and the Spanish bull-fighter were not to be compared. He,
himself, was no mean student of the art of self-defence, and there is
some ground for believing that the scene between Lavengro and the Flaming
Tinman, in which the burly tinker succumbs to the former's prowess after
a warm encounter in the Mumpers' Dingle, is founded upon an event which
occurred during Borrow's wayward progress through rural England.

On the publication of "Lavengro," Borrow's evident partiality for the
pugilists of his day brought down upon him a torrent of criticism and
condemnation. Who, it was asked, but a man of coarse instincts could
have found pleasure in mingling with brutal fighting-men and describing
their desperate exploits? The writer of a work who went out of his way
to drag in such characters and scenes as these could be little better
than a barbarian!

Borrow was not a man to sit down quietly under such attacks as these; he
waited his opportunity, and then had his fling. At the end of "The
Romany Rye," there appeared an Appendix, in which the author set himself
the task of smashing his critics. This same Appendix is an amazing piece
of writing; in it Borrow slashes right and left as might a gallant
swordsman who found himself alone in the midst of a mob bent on his
destruction. Mr. Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but
there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things
that Borrovians would be loth to lose.

Borrow's defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style,
it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the
prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims
defiantly, "Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names
belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called
respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever one of the English
aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by rushing up the
stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret, and rescuing a
woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer says no. A
woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who
rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, wh