half engaged myself elsewhere, thinking that he did not quite appreciate such a trump as I know Borrow to be.  He is as full of meat as an egg, and a fresh laid one—­not one of your Inglis breed, long addled by over-bookmaking.  Borrow will lay you golden eggs, and hatch them after the ways of Egypt; put salt on his tail and secure him in your coop, and beware how any poacher coaxes him with ‘raisins’ or reasons out of the Albemarle preserves.  When you see Mr. Lockhart tell him that I will do the paper.  I owe my entire allowance to the Q.  R. flag ...  Perhaps my understanding the full force of this ‘gratia’ makes me over partial to this wild Missionary; but I have ridden over the same tracks without the tracts, seen the same people, and know that he is true, and I believe that he believes all that he writes to be true.”

Mr. Lockhart himself, however, wrote the review for the Quarterly (No. 141, December 1842).  It was a temptation that he could not resist, and his article was most interesting.  “The Gypsies in Spain” and “The Bible in Spain” went through many editions, and there is still a large demand for both works.  Before we leave George Borrow we will give a few extracts from his letters, which, like his books, were short, abrupt, and graphic.  He was asked to become a member of the Royal Institution.

Mr. George Borrow to John Murray.

February 26, 1843.

“I should like to become a member.  The thing would just suit me, more especially as they do not want clever men, but safe men.  Now, I am safe enough; ask the Bible Society, whose secrets I have kept so much to their satisfaction, that they have just accepted at my hands an English Gypsy Gospel gratis.  What would the Institution expect me to write?  I have exhausted Spain and the Gypsies, though an essay on Welsh language and literature might suit, with an account of the Celtic tongue.  Or, won’t something about the ancient North and its literature be more acceptable?  I have just received an invitation to join the Ethnological Society (who are they?), which I have declined.  I am at present in great demand; a bishop has just requested me to visit him.  The worst of these bishops is that they are skin-flints, saving for their families.  Their cuisine is bad, and their port wine execrable, and as for their cigars!—­I say, do you remember those precious ones of the Sanctuary?  A few days ago one of them turned up again.  I found it in my great-coat pocket, and thought of you.  I have seen the article in the Edinburgh about the Bible—­exceedingly brilliant and clever, but rather too epigrammatic, quotations scanty and not correct.  Ford is certainly a most astonishing fellow; he quite flabbergasts me—­handbooks, review’s, and I hear that he has just been writing a ‘Life of Velasquez’ for the ’Penny Cyclopaedia’!”

OULTON HALL, LOWESTOFT, March 13, 1843.