He has long since sunk to his place in a respectable vault, in the aisle of a very respectable church, whilst an exceedingly respectable marble slab against the neighbouring wall tells on a Sunday some eye wandering from its prayer-book that his dust lies below.  To secure such respectabilities in death he passed a most respectable life, a more respectable-looking individual never was seen.

In the meantime as a sequel to his questionings on the subjects of reality and truth, the Author was asking himself “What is death?” and the query serves as a prelude to the first of the many breezy dialogues with that gipsy cousin-german to Autolycus, Jasper Petulengro.

   “What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?”

“My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song of Pharaoh . . . when a man dies he is cast into the earth and his wife and child sorrow over him.  If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then he is cast into the earth and there is an end of the matter.”

   “And do you think that is the end of man?”

   “There’s an end of him, brother, more’s the pity.”

   “Why do you say so?”

   “Life is sweet, brother.”

   “Do you think so?”

   “Think so! there’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun,
   moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on
   the heath.  Life is very sweet, brother:  who would wish to die?”

   “I would wish to die.”

   “You talk like a gorgio—­which is the same as talking like a fool;
   were you a Romany chal you would talk wiser.  Wish to die, indeed! a
   Romany chal would wish to live for ever.”

   “In sickness, Jasper?”

   “There’s the sun and stars, brother.”

   “In blindness, Jasper?”

“There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that I would gladly live for ever.  Daeta, 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.”

Leaving Norwich and his legal trammels, a few weeks after his father’s death, in 1824, Lavengro reaches London—­the scene of Grub Street struggles not greatly relaxed in severity since the days of Newbery, Gardener and Christopher Smart.  As the genius of Hawthorne was cooped up and enslaved for the American “Peter Parley,” so that of Borrow was hag-ridden by a bookseller publisher of an even worse type, the radical alderman and philanthropic sweater, Sir Richard Phillipps.  For this stony-hearted faddist he covered reams of paper with printers’ copy; and we are told that the kind of compilation that he liked (and probably executed) best was that of Newgate Lives and Trials.  He had well-nigh reached the end of his tether when he had the conversation