“Of his prose I cannot say so much. It is the Romany of the study rather than of the tents [!] Mr Borrow has attempted to rehabilitate English Romany by enduing it with forms and inflections, of which some are still rarely to be heard, some extinct, and others absolutely incorrect; while Mr Leland has been content to give it as it really is. Of the two methods I cannot doubt that most readers will agree with me in thinking that Mr Leland’s is the more satisfactory.” [463b]
The Athenæum sternly rebuked Borrow for seeming “to make the mistake of confounding the amount of Rommanis which he has collected in this book with the actual extent of the language itself.” The reviewer pays a somewhat grudging tribute to other portions of the book, the accounts of the Gypsyries and the biographical particulars of the Romany worthies, but the work suffers by comparison with those of Paspati and Leland. He acknowledges that Borrow was one of the pioneers of those who gave accounts of the Gypsies in English, who gave to many their present taste for Gypsy matters,
“but,” he proceeds, “we cannot allow merely sentimental considerations to prevent us from telling the honest truth. The fact is that the Romano Lavo-Lil is nothing more than a réchauffé of the materials collected by Mr Borrow at an early stage of his investigations, and nearly every word and every phrase may be found in one form or another in his earlier works. Whether or not Mr Borrow has in the course of his long experience become the deep Gypsy which he has always been supposed to be, we cannot say; but it is certain that his present book contains little more than he gave to the public forty years ago, and does not by any means represent the present state of knowledge on the subject. But at the present day, when comparative philology has made such strides, and when want of accurate scholarship is as little tolerated in strange and remote languages as in classical literature, the Romano Lavo-Lil is, to speak mildly, an anachronism.”
This notice, if Borrow read it, must have been very bitter to him. All the loyalty to, and enthusiasm for, Borrow cannot disguise the fact that his work, as far as the Gypsies were concerned, was finished. He had first explored the path, but others had followed and levelled it into a thoroughfare, and Borrow found his facts and theories obsolete—a humiliating discovery to a man so shy, so proud, and so sensitive.
The Romano Lavo-Lil was Borrow’s swan song. He lived for another seven years; but as far as the world was concerned he was dead. In an obituary notice of Robert Latham, Mr Watts-Dunton tells a story that emphasizes how thoroughly his existence had been forgotten. At one of Mrs Procter’s “at homes” he was talking of Latham and Borrow, but when he happened to mention that both men were still alive, that is in the early Seventies, and that quite recently he had been in the company of each on separate occasions, he found that he had lost caste in the eyes of his hearers for talking about men as alive “who were well known to have been dead years ago.” [464]
There is an interesting picture of Borrow as he appeared in the Seventies, given by F. H. Groome, who writes:
“The first time I ever saw him was at Ascot, the Wednesday evening of the Cup week in, I think, the year 1872. I was stopping at a wayside inn, half-a-mile on the Windsor road, just opposite which inn there was a great encampment of Gypsies. One of their lads had on the Tuesday affronted a soldier; so two or three hundred redcoats came over from Windsor, intending to wreck the camp. There was a babel of cursing and screaming, much brandishing of belts and tent-rods, when suddenly an arbiter appeared, a white-haired, brown-eyed, calm Colossus, speaking Romany fluently, and drinking deep draughts of ale—in a quarter of an hour Tommy Atkins and Anselo Stanley were sworn friends over a loving-quart. “Mr Burroughs,” said one of the Gypsies (it is the name by which Gypsies still speak of him), and I knew that at last I had met him whom of all men I most wished to meet. Matty Cooper, the ‘celebrated Windsor Frog’ (vide Leland), presented me as ‘a young gentleman, Rya, a scholard from Oxford’; and ‘H’m,’ quoth Colossus, ‘a good many fools come from Oxford.’ It was a bad beginning, but it ended well, by his asking me to walk with him to the station, and on the way inviting me to call on him in London. I did so, but not until nearly a twelve-month afterwards, when I found him in Hereford Square, and when he set strong ale before me, as again on the occasion of my third and last meeting with him in the tent of our common acquaintance, Shadrach Herne, at the Potteries, Notting Hill. Both these times we had much talk together, but I remember only that it was partly about East Anglia, and more about ‘things of Egypt.’ Conversations twenty years old are easy to imagine, hard to reproduce . . . Probably Borrow asked me the Romany for ‘frying-pan,’ and I modestly answered, ‘Either maasalli or tasseromengri’ (this is password No. 1), and then I may have asked him the Romany for ‘brick,’ to which he will have answered, that ‘there is no such word’ (this is No. 2). But one thing I do remember, that he was frank and kindly, interesting and interested; I was only a lad, and he was verging on seventy. I could tell him about a few ‘travellers’ whom he had not recently seen—Charlie Pinfold, the hoary polygamist, Plato and Mantis Buckland, Cinderella Petulengro, and Old Tom Oliver (‘Ha! so he has seen Tom Oliver,’ I seem to remember that).” [466a]
There was nothing now to keep Borrow in London. Nobody wanted to read his books, other stars had risen in the East. His publisher had exclaimed with energy, as Borrow himself would relate, “I want to meet with good writers, but there are none to be had: I want a man who can write like Ecclesiastes.” There is something tragic in the account that Mr Watts-Dunton gives of his last encounter with Borrow:
“The last time I ever saw him,” he writes, “was shortly before he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and boiling over the West-End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not describe it . . . I never saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with ‘the last of Borrow,’ I shall never forget it.” [466b]
In 1874 Borrow withdrew to Oulton, there to end his lonely life, his spirit seeming to enjoy the dreary solitude of the Cottage, with its mournful surroundings. His stepdaughter, the Henrietta of old, remained in London with her husband, and Borrow’s loneliness was complete. Sometimes he was to be seen stalking along the highways at a great pace, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a Spanish cloak, a tragic figure of solitude and despair, speaking to no one, no one daring to speak to him, who locally was considered as “a funny tempered man.”