e
gloves--the most beautiful girl, gypsy or other, that ever went into East
Anglia. This "left-hand body blow" of hers she delivered so
unexpectedly, and with such an engine-like velocity, that but few boxers
could "stop it."

But, with regard to Isopel Berners, neither Lavengro, nor the man she
thrashed when he stole one of her flaxen hairs to conjure with, gives the
reader the faintest idea of Isopel's method of attack or defence, and we
have to take her prowess on trust.

In a word, Borrow was content to give us the Wonderful, without taking
that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would
have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this
exaggeration of Borrow's, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to
some of the most picturesque pages of "Lavengro."

IV. BORROW'S USE OF PATOIS.

Nor does Borrow take much trouble to give organic life to a dramatic
picture by the aid of _patois_ in dialogue. In every conversation
between Borrow's gypsies, and between them and Lavengro, the illusion is
constantly being disturbed by the vocabulary of the speakers. It is hard
for the reader to believe that characters such as Jasper Petulengro, his
wife, and sister Ursula, between whom so much of the dialogue is
distributed, should make use of the complex sentences and book-words
which Borrow, on occasion, puts into their mouths.

I remember once remarking to him upon the value of _patois_ within
certain limits--not only in imaginative but in biographic art.

His answer came in substance to this, that if the matter of the dialogue
be true to nature, the entire verisimilitude of the form is a secondary
consideration.

"Walter Scott," said he, "has run to death the method of _patois_
dialogue."

He urged, moreover, that the gypsies really are extremely fond of
uncommon and fine words. And this, no doubt, is true, especially in
regard to the women. There is nothing in which the native superiority of
the illiterate Romany woman over the illiterate English woman of the road
is more clearly seen than in the love of long "book-words" (often
mispronounced) displayed by the former. Strong, however, as is the
Romany chi's passion for fine words, her sentences are rarely complex
like some of the sentences Borrow puts into her mouth.

With regard, however, to the charge of idealising gypsy life--a charge
which has often been brought against Borrow--it must be remembered that
the gyp