do that:  but he comprehended whatever in them is open to comprehension, and his undying interest in them is due not only to his sympathy with their way of life, but to the fact that his curiosity about them could never be quite satisfied.  Other mysteries come and go, but the gipsy mystery stays with us, and was to Borrow a source of endless content.  For after sharpening his wits on the ethnological riddle, he could refresh himself with the psychical aspect of the matter, discovering in them the incarnation of one essential human quality, incompletely present in all men.  They are the perfect vagabonds; but the germ of vagabondage inheres in mankind at large, and is the source of the changes that have resulted in what we call civilization.  Borrow’s nature comprised the gipsy, but the gipsy by no means comprised him; he wandered like them, but the object of his wanderings was something more than to tell dukkeripens, poison pigs, mend kettles, or deal in horseflesh.  Therefore he puzzled them more than they did him.

‘The Gipsies of Spain’ (1841) was his first book about them; ‘Lavengro’ came ten years later, and ‘Romany Rye’ six years after that.  In 1874 he returns to the subject in ‘Roman Lavo-lil,’ a sort of dictionary and phrase-book of the language, but unlike any other dictionary and phrase-book ever conceived:  it is well worth reading as a piece of entertaining literature.  His other books are translations of Norse and Welsh poetry, and a book of travels in ‘Wild Wales,’ published in 1862.  All these works are more than readable:  the translations, though rugged and unmusical, have about them a frank sensuousness and a primitive force that are amusing and attractive.  But after all, Borrow is never thoroughly himself in literature unless the gipsies are close at hand; and of all his gipsy books ‘Lavengro’ is by far the best.  Indeed, it is so much the best and broadest thing that he produced, that the reader who would know Borrow need never go beyond these pages.  In ‘Lavengro’ we get the culmination of both the author and the man; it is his book in the full sense, and may afford profitable study to any competent reader for a lifetime.

‘Lavengro,’ in fact, is like nothing else in either biography or fiction—­and it is both fictitious and biographical.  It is the gradual revelation of a strange, unique being.  But the revelation does not proceed in an orderly and chronological fashion:  it is not begun in the first chapter, and still less is it completed in the last.  After a careful perusal of the book, you will admit that though it has fascinated and impressed you, you have quite failed to understand it.  Why is the author so whimsical?  Wherefore these hinted but unconfessed secrets?  Why does he stop short on the brink of an important disclosure, and diverge under cover of a line of asterisks into another subject?—­But Borrow in ‘Lavengro’ is not constructing a book, he is creating one.  He has the reserves of a man who respects his own nature, yet he treats