[197] The whole of this diary will be issued in my edition of The Collected Works. It has appeared, with my permission, in the Manx Folk Lore Magazine, Mannin, November, 1914.
[199] They lived first at 169 King Street, then at two addresses unknown, then successively at 37, 38 and 39 Camperdown Terrace; their last address was 28 Trafalgar Place.
[229] I am indebted to Mr. Edward Heron-Allen for the information that this is the original of the last verse but one in FitzGerald’s first version of the Rubáiyát:
r 74.
Ah Moon of my Delight, who knowest no wane,
The Moon of Heaven is rising once again,
How oft, hereafter rising, shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain.
[255] Henrietta’s guitar is now in my possession and is a very handsome instrument.
[256] Henrietta MacOubrey put every difficulty in the way of Dr. Knapp, and I hold many letters from her strongly denouncing his Life.
[268] A word that is very misleading, as no writer was ever so little the founder of a school.
[269a] Although this fact was not known until 1908 when I published The Brontës: Life and Letters. See vol. ii. p. 24, where Charlotte Brontë writes: “In George Borrow’s works I found a wild fascination, a vivid graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic simplicity, which give them a stamp of their own.”
[269b] Theodore Watts-Dunton, Augustine Birrell and Francis Hindes Groome. Lionel Johnson’s essay on Borrow is the more valuable in its enthusiasm in that it was written by a Roman Catholic. Writing in the Outlook (1st April, 1899) he said:
“What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort. Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the worst side of ‘civilised’ life in cities. They give you the sense of emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a milieu where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can say, though he would not have you say it—Requiescat in pace Viator.”