another. Take the case of Jasper Petulengro's arm.
Borrow knew the man Ambrose Smith well enough to know whether he had a
long or a short arm: for did not Jasper say to him when he was dismal,
"We'll now go to the tents and put on the gloves, and I'll try to make
you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!" Possibly he had
a short arm like his father, but in reading the proof it must somehow
have seemed to Borrow that his Jasper Petulengro--founded on Ambrose
Smith and at many points resembling him--ought to have a long arm. The
short arm was true to "the facts"; the long arm was more impressive and
was truer to the created character, which was more important.

It was hardly these little things that kept Borrow working at "Lavengro"
for nearly half of his fourth decade and a full half of his fifth. But
these little things were part of the great difficulty of making an
harmonious whole by changing, cutting out and inserting. When Ford and
John Murray's reader asked him for his life they probably meant a plain
statement of a few "important facts," such facts as there could hardly be
two opinions about, such facts as fill the ordinary biography or "Who's
Who." Borrow knew well enough that these facts either produce no effect
in the reader's mind or they produce one effect here and a different one
there, since the dullest mind cannot blankly receive a dead statement
without some effort to give it life. Borrow was not going to commit
himself to incontrovertible statements such as are or might be made to a
Life Insurance Company. He had no command of a tombstone style and would
not have himself circumscribed with full Christian name, date of birth,
etc., as a sexton or parish clerk might have done for him. Twenty years
later indeed--in 1862--he did write such an account of himself to be
printed as part of an appendix to a history of his old school at Norwich.
It is full of dates, but they are often inaccurate, and the years 1825 to
1833 he fills with "a life of roving adventures." He cannot refrain from
calling himself a great rider, walker and swimmer, or from telling the
story of how he walked from Norwich to London--he calls it London to
Norwich--in twenty-seven hours. But in 1862 he could rely on "Lavengro"
and "The Romany Rye"; he was an author at the end of his career, and he
had written himself down to the best of his genius. The case was
different in 1842.

He saw himself as a man variously and