“The personages in these inimitable books are not merely snap-shots, they are living pictures; and, more than that, the people are moving about amid fluttering leaves and flickering sunlight and waves of shadow and rippling brooks.  One neither misses the colours of the landscapes nor the very sounds of the voices.  Moreover, the characters, though we feel that they have never come within the range of our experience, yet did actually live and move and talk as they are represented; and we know, too, that such characters have passed away from our earth—­improved off the face of it.  And we regret, in spite of ourselves, that these gypsies are gone.  The rogues will never come back!  A feeling of disappointment is apt to come over us as we read, and we are ready to stop and ask angrily, ’Why can’t we drop in among the tents, and see an Ursula or a Pakomovna, and have our fortunes told as of yore?’ And we know that it cannot be, and that the Romany Rye is a being who lived and moved in a different age from ours, as different as the age of Hector and Achilles, when warriors fought in their chariots round the walls of Troy, and the long-haired Achaians hurled their spears and stole one another’s horses in the darkness, and kings made long speeches armed to the teeth, and ran away with other kings’ wives or multiplied their own.  We go on to confess to ourselves that we must be content with hearing about all the strange experience of the Romany Rye at second-hand, and since it must be so, we shall do well to surrender ourselves to such a magician as this and make the best of it.” {38}

After the publication of the Romany Rye in 1857, Borrow made one more contribution to Belles Lettres in the book called Wild Wales, issued in three volumes in 1862.  It commemorates a journey made in the summer of 1854, while its heroic championship of the Bardic literature recalls the earlier enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym.  If after his return from Spain a definite sphere of activity abroad could have been allotted to Borrow (by preference in the East, as he himself desired), we might have had from his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added lustre to a group of writers already brilliantly represented in England by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton.  With Burton’s love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of the Bible in Spain had many points in common.  As it was, the later years of Borrow’s life were spent somewhat moodily, and with some of the mystery of Swift’s or of Rousseau’s, at Oulton, near Lowestoft, whence, at Christmas 1874, he sent a message to the neighbouring hermit, Edward Fitzgerald at Woodbridge, in the vain hope of eliciting a visit. {39a} His wife, who had been won with her widow’s jointure and dower during the flush of his missionary successes in 1840, died at the end of January 1869, {39b} and on July