t remembered me I do not
know, but I recognised the face it showed me full well.

"If it was not the identical face of the red-haired priest whom I had
seen at Rome, may I catch cold!

"Young gentleman, I will now take a spell on your blanket--young lady,
good-night."

[_End of Vol. III._, 1851.]

THE EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT.

_Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ (properly _Romano Rai_) were terms
applied to George Borrow in his youth by the Norfolk Gypsy, Ambrose
Smith, better known in these volumes as Jasper Petulengro. The names
signify respectively "Philologist" and "the Gypsy Gentleman". The two
works thus entitled constitute a more or less exact autobiography of the
writer of them, from the date of his birth to the end of August, 1825.
The author himself confesses in his Preface that "the time embraces
nearly the first quarter of the present century".

_Lavengro_ was written at Oulton, in Suffolk, slowly and at intervals,
between the years 1842 and 1851. The MSS. exist in three varieties: 1.
The primitive draft of a portion, found scattered through sundry
notebooks and on isolated scraps of paper, as described in the letter to
Dawson Turner (_Life_, i., p. 394). 2. The definitive autograph text in
one thick quarto volume. 3. The transcript for the printers, made by
Mrs. Borrow, in one large folio volume, interlarded with the author's
additions and corrections.

The text of the present edition reproduces with fidelity the first issue
of 1851. Occasionally a verbal alteration, introduced by the author
himself into his second edition of 1872, has been adopted in this,
whenever it seemed to improve the reading. In general, however, that
reprint was in many respects a defective one. Not only words, but even
whole sentences, which had escaped the printers, remained undetected by
the editor, and, as a consequence, were lost to later impressions, based,
as they all have been, on that issue. We should have preferred to alter,
quietly and without remark, certain errors in the text, as we did in the
documents published in the _Life_; but save in a single instance, we have
left such inaccuracies intact, reserving all corrections for the place
where we might be supposed to exercise a free hand. {553}

The insertion, with brackets of course, of the promised inedited
episodes, caused in two cases some embarrassment. In removing them from
the final form of his MS., Mr. Borrow closed up the gap with a few
fittin