The utmost Borrow could do was to induce the editor of Once a Week—which had just entertained a very different kind of angel unawares in the person of George Meredith—to publish a series of ballads and stories from the Manx, Russian, Danish, and old Norse.

But in 1862 occurred a literary event whose importance was very slowly realised. “Wild Wales” appeared. Its reception by the critics was exceedingly curious. Most of the newspapers ignored it altogether; others were unjust to the point of savagery. For concentrated malice, the Cornhill notice would be difficult to surpass. “Really,” wrote the reviewer (obviously as closely in touch with Borrow and his subject as a cat with the differential calculus), “it is too much to demand that we should read the record of every glass of ale which Mr. Borrow drank—usually with his criticism of its quality—or be patient under the fatiguing triviality of, ‘I paid my bill and departed,’ which occurs incessantly.” But, lest it should be imagined that Borrow was either drinking beer or paying hotel bills all the time he was in Wales, the reviewer went on grudgingly to admit that “snatches of commonplace conversation and intensely prosaic translations of Welsh-poems swell out this book and render it rather tiresome reading.” At least one notice was both fair and complimentary, and foreshadowed the very high opinion in which the book is held at the present day by Welshmen. That was the article in the Spectator, which described it as “the first really clever book we remember to have seen in which an honest attempt is made to do justice to the Welsh literature. . . . In the course of his wanderings Mr. Borrow caught very happily the salient points in the Welsh character, and he has depicted them with those light, free touches which none but George Borrow can hit off to such perfection.” True, the Spectator discovered “the fine Roman hand” of Mr. Borrow in some of the speeches of his friends, but felt sure that the conversations were in substance faithfully recorded.

Borrow was in his sixtieth year when “Wild Wales” was published. In spite of the extraordinary extent and variety of his activities, he was by no means an old man. He retained his physical vigour; his mental force was unimpaired. He was to have twenty years more of life in which to accumulate new experiences and contract a rare friendship or two. Yet he had certainly outgrown his vogue. The older public that had hailed some of his writing with demonstrative joy had gone; he had not found—nor was to find while he lived—the newer public that could enter into the spirit in which he did his work. It is a little disconcerting, but not really a matter for surprise, that after the publication of “Wild Wales” Borrow gradually sank out of view. He buried himself still deeper in his philological studies. At intervals he vanished from London to make tours in various parts of the British Islands. Rough notes of these may be consulted in Knapp; they were never polished into anything like literary form. In 1865 came another severance: Miss Clarke, his step-daughter, married Dr. William MacOubrey, and went to live at Belfast. The “old Hen” of Borrow’s letters, the “Henrietta” of “Wild Wales,” had been a member of his household ever since the golden days of sunny Seville, and he had a very deep and sincere affection for her. He did not, of course, feel the separation so acutely as did his wife, who had never parted from her for more than a few weeks at a time during the forty-seven years since she was born; and it was Mrs. Borrow who planned a visit to the Orange capital in the following year. She was escorted to Belfast by her husband, who left her there with Mrs. MacOubrey, while he went off to Scotland. Crossing to Stranraer, he set out upon a lonely tramp in the Lowlands and the Border Country. He visited Abbotsford, but, his rage against Sir Walter Scott having subsided, his notes are as mild as a guidebook. Pushing on to Edinburgh, he returned to Glasgow by rail, and took the steamer to Belfast, spending the remaining weeks of the holiday in Ulster, with pedestrian trips to Lisburn and Antrim.

The journey through the Border was not without some literary fruit, as will be seen. For some years Borrow had been absorbed in Welsh and Danish poetry; but just now his attention was returning to the gypsy friends of his youth. At Kirk Yetholm, a few miles south-east of Kelso, dwelt Esther Blyth, the descendant of a famous gypsy king, herself endowed with a royal title, “the Queen of the Nokkums.” Her majesty was sought out and “interviewed,” and the notes of this encounter were worked into a chapter of the last book Borrow ever wrote.

CHAPTER XIII
DEATH OF MRS. BORROW

During the visit to Belfast Mrs. Borrow had been unwell, and her ill-health was her husband’s principal cause of anxiety for the following three years. In 1867 they visited Bognor, where she was revivified by the sea breezes, while he made tours through Hampshire and the New Forest. The next year complications arose in the administration of the Oulton estate, and they had to go into Norfolk to extricate the business. On their return, Mrs. Borrow failed rapidly. Weakened by heart disease and dropsy, and worried by the prospect of litigation with a neighbour, her illness took a serious form, and threw Borrow into a state of melancholy in which “the Horrors” attacked him, as we find by a reference in Miss Cobbe’s autobiography. She speaks of having one night “cheered him and sent him off quite brisk” after a bout of this kind, her method being to engage him in theological argument “in a serious way”! He “abounded in my sense of the nonexistence of Hell.” If the processes by which they sought to remove Borrow’s megrims were original, the sympathy and solicitude of Miss Cobbe and Miss Lloyd were unfailing. But none of the cares of friendship, no effort on Borrow’s part, could avail to stave off the disaster that approached. His wife grew worse, and on January 30th, 1869, succumbed to an aggregation of maladies, just in time to obviate the necessity (foreshadowed by Dr. Playfair, who was called in at the end) of sequestration because of mental affliction.

Thus sadly closed the long partnership of thirty years so romantically begun at Seville in “a dream of sunshine and shade, of falling water and flowers.” Mrs. Borrow had reached the age of seventy-three, and was seven years older than her husband. His grief was terrible. He had lost her who had been in literal fact his better half, who had inspired his courage and fought his “Horrors” for him, had organised his business, and had been wife and friend, counsellor and physician, amanuensis and private secretary rolled into one. “Poor old Borrow is in a sad state,” wrote Miss Cobbe. In his distraught condition friendliness suffered. He hesitated to “trouble anyone with his sorrows” and, when over-persuaded to dine out, was melancholy, “so cross so rude,” as said Miss Cobbe on one occasion. Her narrative of the attempts she made to drag him out of himself is luminous with humour—conscious and unconscious. There was much innocent malice in the fashion in which she set her superior knowledge of Norse lore against his, parrying his Firbolgs with her Keatinge, and his Tuatha-de-Danaan with her Hakon of Norway. But she did not perceive that the most humorous thing of all was the fact that she should attempt to raise a bereaved man out of his despair by touching him in his most tender intellectual spots.

For a year after the death of his wife Borrow buried himself in books—out-of-the-way books, archaic books, as usual. Drake’s “Historia Anglo-Scotica” figures in the list. He declared to Miss Cobbe that he had read no modern writer since Scott. This was not literally accurate. He had read and admired Dickens, for, in a letter to Luis de Usóz, he spoke of him as “a second Fielding . . . who, in certain novels founded on life in London and the provinces, as displayed in every grade of society from the lowest to the highest, has evinced such talent, such humour, variety and profound knowledge of character, that he charms his readers—at least, those that have the capacity to comprehend him. . . . Read, as soon as you can, all the writings of ‘Boz,’ and I am sure you will thank me all your life for having disclosed to you a mine of such delectable reading.” [241] His opinion of Scott had undergone considerable modification since the days of the Appendix and “Charlie-o’er-the-Waterism,” for he said that “Scott was greater than Homer!” (The italics and the note of astonishment are Miss Cobbe’s.)

Another sweeping dictum of his on the same occasion was that the Norse stories were “far grander than the Greek.” But Borrow was addicted to impulsive generalisations, and we need pay no more special attention to these judgments promulgated in Hereford Square than to the declarations made at various times that Gronwy Owen’s account of the toppling down of the crag of Snowdon on the Judgment Day was better than anything in Homer, that Horace and Martial were not superior to Ab Gwilym, and that Huw Morris was the finest lyrical poet of the seventeenth century.

Not long after these passages at arms with Miss Cobbe, he was suddenly plunged again into the old romantic interest of gypsyism. Towards the end of 1870 he received a letter from C. G. Leland, who had then been about eighteen months in England, and was pursuing his studies of the English gypsies on more scientific and more thorough lines than Borrow had ever adopted. No two men were farther apart in literary characteristics than Borrow and Leland. The author of the “Hans Breitmann” ballads is far better known to the larger world as a writer of comic verse than as a student of languages and folklore. “Hans Breitmann’s Barty” and “Ping-Wing, the Pieman’s Son” are in everybody’s mouth; “The English Gypsies and their Language” and his “Gypsy Sorcery” are familiar mainly to the elect. The humour of Borrow and that of Leland are of widely different character. Leland’s gay spirit lights a lamp of jocund fancy; Borrow’s humour is elemental, and, when his art adds quality to it, the quality is sardonic. Yet these two were attuned in a remarkable way, and on the subject of gypsyism and philology their tastes were in common. Borrow—leaving out of account a little natural jealousy—could hardly fail to be attracted to the man who was to write so vividly later of his intimacy with all “the lords and earls of Little Egypt” in the south of England, and of those sojourns in the tents which involved “a great deal of strangely picturesque rural life, night-scenes by firelight, in forests and by river banks, and marvellously odd reminiscences of other days.” And there were other interests held by both—for Leland was a Celtic scholar; did he not “discover” Shelta, and know all about the olden men, who