ither return to Norwich and share his mother's narrow
income, or turn to account in some way the magnificent physical strength
with which nature had endowed him. Determining on the latter of these
courses, he left London on tramp. As he stood considerably more than 6
ft. in height, was a fairly trained athlete, and had a countenance of
extraordinary impressiveness, if not of commanding beauty--Greek in type
with a dash of the Hebrew--we may assume that there had never before
appeared on the English high-roads so majestic-looking a tramp as he
who, on an afternoon in May, left his squalid lodging with bundle and
stick to begin life on the roads. Shaping his course to the south-west,
he soon found himself on Salisbury Plain. And then his extraordinary
adventures began. After a while he became a travelling hedge-smith, and
it was while pursuing this avocation that he made the acquaintance of
the splendid road-girl, born at Long Melford workhouse, whom he has
immortalized under the name of Isopel Berners. He was now brought much
into contact with the gipsies, and this fact gave him the most important
subject-matter for his writings. For picturesque as is Borrow's style,
it is this subject-matter of his, the Romany world of Great Britain,
which--if his pictures of that world are true--will keep his writings
alive. Now that the better class of gipsies are migrating so rapidly to
America that scarcely any are left in England, Borrow's pictures of them
are challenged as being too idealistic. It is unfortunate that no one
who knew Borrow, and the gryengroes or horse-dealers with whom he
associated, and whom he depicted, has ever written about him and them.
Full of "documents" as is Dr Knapp's painstaking biography, it cannot be
said to give a vital picture of Borrow and his surroundings during this
most interesting period of his life. It is this same peculiar class of
gipsies (the gryengroes) with whom the present writer was brought into
contact, and he can only refer, in justification of Borrow's
descriptions of them, to certain publications of his own, where the
whole question is discussed at length, and where he has set out to prove
that Borrow's pictures of the section of the English gipsies he knew are
not idealized. But there is one great blemish in _all_ Borrow's dramatic
scenes of gipsy life, wheresoever they may be laid. This was pointed
out by the gentleman who "read" _Zincali_ for Mr Murray, the
publisher:--

"The d