ary had."

Yours,
EDWARD THOMAS.

LAUGHARNE,
CAERMARTHENSHIRE,
_December_, 1911.

CHAPTER I--BORROW'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The subject of this book was a man who was continually writing about
himself, whether openly or in disguise. He was by nature inclined to
thinking about himself and when he came to write he naturally wrote about
himself; and his inclination was fortified by the obvious impression made
upon other men by himself and by his writings. He has been dead thirty
years; much has been written about him by those who knew him or knew
those that did: yet the impression still made by him, and it is one of
the most powerful, is due mainly to his own books. Nor has anything
lately come to light to provide another writer on Borrow with an excuse.
The impertinence of the task can be tempered only by its apparent
hopelessness and by that necessity which Voltaire did not see.

I shall attempt only a re-arrangement of the myriad details accessible to
all in the writings of Borrow and about Borrow. Such re-arrangement will
sometimes heighten the old effects and sometimes modify them. The total
impression will, I hope, not be a smaller one, though it must inevitably
be softer, less clear, less isolated, less gigantic. I do not wish, and
I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope
that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that
portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies--damned
lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much
about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain
fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in
possession of all the facts. In most cases the fact--to use an equivocal
term--is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow's impression is as
green as grass. His "lies" are lies only in the same sense as all
clothing is a lie.

For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn
brotherhood with him as a boy. He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy,
and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real
name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro. In print he
was given the name Jasper Petulengro--Petulengro being Gypsy for
shoesmith--and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most
unforgetable of heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his
form and character have probably created quite a n