g for accuracy, confine
himself to a record of what happened?

Of course not. The moment a man begins to write about himself, to delve
in the past, to ransack the storehouse of his memory; then--if he has
anything of the literary artist about him, and otherwise his book will
not be worth the paper it is written on--he will take in a partner to
assist him. That partner's name is Romance.

As a revelation of temperament, the _Confessions_ of Rousseau and the
_Memoires_ of Casanova are, one feels, delightfully trustworthy. But no
sane reader ever imagines that he is reading an accurate transcript from
the life of these adventurous gentlemen. The difference between the
editions of De Quincey's _Opium Eater_ is sufficient to show how the
dreams have expanded under popular approbation.

Borrow himself suggests this romantic method when he says, "What is an
autobiography? Is it a mere record of a man's life, or is it a picture
of the man himself?" Certainly, no one carried the romantic colouring
further than he did. When he started to write his own life in _Lavengro_
he had no notion of diverging from the strict line of fact. But the
adventurer Vagabond moved uneasily in the guise of the chronicler. He
wanted more elbow-room. He remembered all that he hoped to encounter,
and from hopes it was no far cry to actualities.

Things might have happened so! Ye gods, they _did_ happen so! And after
all it matters little to us the exact proportion of fact and fiction.
What does matter is that the superstructure he has raised upon the
foundation of fact is as strange and unique as the palace of Aladdin.

However much he suggested the typical Anglo-Saxon in real life, there was
the true Celt whenever he took pen in hand.

A stranger blend of the Celt and the Saxon indeed it would be hard to
find. The Celtic side is not uppermost in his temperament--this strong,
assertive, prize-fighting, beer-loving man (a good drinker, but never a
drunkard) seems far more Saxon than anything else. De Quincey had no
small measure of the John Bull in [Picture: George Borrow] his
temperament, and Borrow had a great deal more. The John Bull side was
very obvious. Yet a Celt he was by parentage, and the Celtic part was
unmistakable, though below the surface. If the East Anglian in him had a
weakness for athleticism, boiled mutton and caper sauce, the Celt in him
responded quickly to the romantic associates of Wales.

Readers of Mr. Wa