ot
pay), the new meeting with the gipsies in the Castle Field, the
fight--only the first of many excellent fights--these are but a few of
the memories which rise to every reader of even the early chapters of
this extraordinary book, and they do not cover its first hundred pages
in the common edition. Then his father dies and the born vagrant is set
loose for vagrancy. He goes to London, with a stock of translations
which is to make him famous, and a recommendation from Taylor of Norwich
to "the publisher." The publisher exacted something more than his pound
of flesh in the form of Newgate Lives and review articles, and paid,
when he did pay, in bills of uncertain date which were very likely to be
protested. But Borrow won through it all, making odd acquaintances with
a young man of fashion (his least lifelike sketch); with an apple-seller
on London Bridge, who was something of a "fence" and had erected Moll
Flanders (surely the oddest patroness ever so selected) into a kind of
patron saint; with a mysterious Armenian merchant of vast wealth, whom
the young man, according to his own account, finally put on a kind of
filibustering expedition against both the Sublime Porte and the White
Czar, for the restoration of Armenian independence. At last, out of
health with perpetual work and low living, out of employ, his friends
beyond call, he sees destruction before him, writes _The Life and
Adventures of Joseph Sell_ (name of fortunate omen!) almost at a heat
and on a capital, fixed and floating, of eighteen-pence, and disposes of
it for twenty pounds by the special providence of the Muses. With this
twenty pounds his journey into the blue distance begins. He travels,
partly by coach, to somewhere near Salisbury, and gives the first of the
curiously unfavourable portraits of stage coachmen, which remain to
check Dickens's rose-coloured representations of Mr. Weller and his
brethren. I incline to think that Borrow's was likely to be the truer
picture. According to him, the average stage coachman was anything but
an amiable character, greedy, insolent to all but persons of wealth and
rank, a hanger-on of those who might claim either; bruiser enough to be
a bully but not enough to be anything more; in short, one of the worst
products of civilisation. From civilisation itself, however, Borrow soon
disappears, as far as any traceable signs go. He journeys, not farther
west but northwards, into the West Midlands and the marches of Wal