sies to whom he introduces us are the better kind of gryengroes
(horse-dealers), by far the most prosperous of all gypsies. Borrow's
"gryengroes" are not in any way more prosperous than those he knew.

These nomads have an instinctive knowledge of horseflesh--will tell the
amount of "blood" in any horse by a lightning glance at his quarters--and
will sometimes make large sums before the fair is over.

Yet, on the whole, I will not deny that Borrow was as successful in
giving us vital portraits of English and Irish characters as of Romany
characters, perhaps more so.

That hypochondriacal strain in Borrow's nature, which Dr. Hake alludes
to, perhaps prevented him from sympathising fully with the joyous Romany
temper. But over and above this, and charming as the Petulengro family
are, they do not live as do the characters of Mr. Groome in his
delightful book "In Gypsy Tents"--a writer whose treatises on the gypsies
in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," and in "Chambers' Encyclopedia," are
as full of the fruits of actual personal contact with the gypsies as of
the learning to be derived from books.

V. THE SAVING GRACE OF PUGILISM.

Borrow's "Flaming Tinman" is, of course, a brilliant success, but then
he, though named Bosville, is not a pure gypsy. He is what is called on
the roads, I believe, a "half and half"; and in nothing is more clearly
seen that "prepotency of transmission," which I have elsewhere attributed
to the Anglo-Saxon in the racial struggle, than in hybrids of this kind.
A thorough-bred Romany chal can be brutal enough, but the "Flaming
Tinman's" peculiar shade of brutality is Anglo-Saxon, not Romany. The
Tinman's ironical muttering while unharnessing his horse, "Afraid. H'm!
Afraid; that was the word, I think," is worthy of Dickens at his very
best--worthy of Dickens when he created Rogue Riderhood--but it is hardly
Romany, I think.

The battle in the dingle is superb.

Borrow is always at his strongest when describing a pugilistic encounter:
for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English accomplishment, he
believed as devoutly almost as he believed in East Anglia and the Bible.
It was this more than anything else that aroused the ire of the critics
of "Lavengro" when it first appeared. One critical journal characterised
the book as the work of a "barbarian."

This was in 1851, when Clio seemed set upon substituting Harlequin's wand
for Britannia's trident, seemed set upon crowning he