publishing an account of Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic bards. He
travelled--on foot principally--from Inverness to Thurso, and is going
on to-morrow to Zetland. He walked lately through the upper part of
Badenoch, Lochaber, and the adjacent counties, and through Mull, which
he greatly admired.... In his rambles he associated exclusively with the
lower classes, and when I offered to give him letters of introduction to
Wm. F. Skene, Robert Chambers, Joseph Robertson, etc., he declined to
accept them. His mother died lately and he was travelling, he said, to
divert and throw off his melancholy. He talked very freely on all
subjects that one broached, but not with precision, and he appeared to
me to be an amiable man and a gentleman, but, withal, something of a
projector, if not an adventurer. He is certainly eccentric. I asked him
to take wine, etc., and he declined. He said he was bred at the High
School of Edinburgh, and that he was there in 1813, and mentioned that
he was partly educated in Ireland, and that by birth and descent he is
an Englishman.'

CHAPTER XXX

_THE ROMANY RYE_

George Borrow's three most important books had all a very interesting
history. We have seen the processes by which _The Bible in Spain_ was
built up from notebooks and letters. We have seen further the most
curious apprenticeship by which _Lavengro_ came into existence. The most
distinctly English book--at least in a certain absence of
cosmopolitanism--that Victorian literature produced was to a great
extent written on scraps of paper during a prolonged Continental tour
which included Constantinople and Budapest. In _Lavengro_ we have only
half a book, the whole work, which included what came to be published as
_The Romany Rye_, having been intended to appear in four volumes. The
first volume was written in 1843, the second in 1845, after the
Continental tour, which is made use of in the description of the
Hungarian, and the third volume in the years between 1845 and 1848. Then
in 1852 Borrow wrote out an 'advertisement' of a fourth volume,[198]
which runs as follows:

Shortly will be published in one volume. Price 10s. _The
Rommany Rye_, Being the fourth volume of _Lavengro_. By George
Borrow, author of _The Bible in Spain_.

But this volume did not make an appearance 'shortly.' Its author was far
too much offended with the critics, too disheartened it may be to care
to offer himself again for their gibes. The years