The Bible in Spain was a popular book, and in 1843, the year of its publication, its author, a man of striking appearance, was much feted and regarded by the lion-hunters of the period.  Borrow did not take kindly to the den.  He was full of inbred suspicions and, perhaps, of unreasonable demands.  He resented the confinement of the dinner-table, the impalement of the ball-room, the imprisonment of the pew.  Like the lion in Browning’s poem, ’The Glove’—­

   You saw by the flash on his forehead,
   By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
   He was leagues in the desert already,
   Driving the flocks up the mountain.

He began to write Lavengro in London in 1843.  His thoughts went back to his old friend Petulengro, who pronounced life to be sweet:  ’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?’ Yes, or to live cribbed, cabined, and confined in a London square!  No wonder ‘Lavengro’ felt cross and uncomfortable.  Nor did he take much pleasure in the society of the other lions of the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John Bowring, M.P.  Was not Bowring ‘Lavengro’ as much as Borrow himself?  Had he not—­for there was no end to his impudence—­travelled in Spain, and actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular?  Was he not meditating translations from a score of languages he said he knew?  Was he not, furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel?  Were not his wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to ’Charley o’er the Waterism’?  Borrow did not get on with Bowring.

When Borrow shook the dust of London off his feet, and returned into Norfolk with Lavengro barely begun on his hands, he carried away with him into his retreat the antipathies and prejudices, the whimsical dislikes and the half-real, half-sham disappointments and chagrins which London, that fertile mother of megrims, had bred in him, and dropped them all into the ink with which he wrote his famous book.  Gentility he forswore.  Whatever else Lavengro might turn out, genteel he was not to be; and sure enough, when Lavengro made his appearance in 1851 genteel he most certainly was not.

There was not the same public to welcome the Gypsy as had hailed the Colporteur.  The pious phrases which had garnished so plentifully the earlier book had now almost wholly disappeared.  There is no evidence that Lavengro ever offered Petulengro a Bible.  Even the denunciations of Popery have a dubious sound.  What is sometimes called ’the religious world’ were no longer buyers of Borrow.  Nor was ‘the polite world’ much better pleased.  The polite reader was both puzzled and annoyed.  First of all:  Was the book true—­autobiography or romance?  A polite reader objects to be made