However, he took me into his
room, where I fancy my knock had roused him from a siesta. We
soon got into talk. He began by some unkind remarks about one
or two of our common friends, but I soon turned the subject to
books, especially Spanish and Welsh books. Here I own I was
disappointed in his conversation. I talked to him about Ab
Gwilym, whom he speaks so highly of in _Wild Wales_, but his
interest was languid. He did not seem interested when I told
him that the London Society of Cymmrodorion were publishing in
their journal the Welsh poems of Iolo Goch, the bard of Owen
Glendower who fought with our Henry v., two of whose poems
Borrow had given spirited translations of in _Wild Wales_. He
told me he had heaps of translations from Welsh books somewhere
in his cupboards but he did not know where to lay his hand on
them. He did not show me one Welsh or Spanish book of any kind.
You may easily imagine that I was disappointed with my
interview and I never cared to visit him again. Borrow was a
man of real genius, and his _Bible in Spain_ and _Wild Wales_
are unique books in their way, but with all his knowledge of
languages he was not a scholar. I should be the last person to
depreciate his _Sleeping Bard_, for I owe a great deal to it as
it helped me to read the Welsh original, but it is full of
careless mistakes. The very title is wrong; it should not be
the _Visions of the Sleeping Bard_ but the _Visions of the Bard
Sleep_, as the bard or prophet Sleep shows the author in a
series of dreams--his visions of life, death, and hell, which
form the three chapters of the book.

Borrow knew nothing of philology. His strange version of 'Om
mani padme hum' (Oh! the gem in the lotus ho!) must have been
taken from some phonetic representation of the sounds as heard
by an ignorant traveller in China or Mongolia.

I have written this long letter lured on by my recollections,
but after all I can tell you nothing. Surely it is best that
Borrow should remain a name; we have the best part of him still
living in his best books.

'He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.'

I don't see why we should trouble ourselves about his 'worst.'
He had his weaker side like all of us, the foolish part of his
nature as well a