Mrs. William Morris Frontispiece
A. C. Swinburne to face page [8]
Theodore Watts-Dunton [18]
Dante Gabriel Rossetti [70]
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt [80], [120]
Christina Rossetti [178]
Mrs. Rossetti [182]
Dr. Gordon Hake [208]
William Morris [240]
Francis Hindes Groome [278]

I. GEORGE BORROW.
1803–1881.

I.

I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which appeared in The Athenæum. [25] I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he descanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many human endowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrow would gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail

on the head with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie,” and dazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of the dingle.

Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton, there were circumstances in our intercourse—circumstances, I mean, connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience—which make me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or broke more thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated him from all but a few. However, be this as it may, no one at least realized more fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all his angularities—how simple and courageous, how manly and noble. His shyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people, and consequently those who at any time during his life really understood him must have been very few. How was it, then, that such a man wandered about over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspicious and intractable as the gipsies? A natural enough question, which I have often been asked, and this is my reply:—

Those who know the gipsies will understand me when I say that this suspicious and wary race of wanderers—suspicious and wary from

an instinct transmitted through ages of dire persecutions from the Children of the Roof—will readily fraternize with a blunt, single-minded, and shy eccentric like Borrow, while perhaps the skilful man of the world may find all his tact and savoir faire useless and, indeed, in the way. And the reason of this is not far to seek, perhaps. What a gipsy most dislikes is the feeling that his “gorgio” interlocutor is thinking about him; for, alas! to be the object of “gorgio” thoughts—has it not been a most dangerous and mischievous honour to every gipsy since first his mysterious race was driven to accept the grudging hospitality of the Western world? A gipsy hates to be watched, and knows at once when he is being watched; for in tremulous delicacy of apprehension his organization is far beyond that of an Englishman, or, indeed, of any member of any of the thick-fingered races of Europe. One of the results of this excessive delicacy is that a gipsy can always tell to a surety whether a “gorgio” companion is thinking about him, or whether the “gorgio’s” thoughts are really and genuinely occupied with the fishing rod, the net, the gin, the gun, or whatsoever may be the common source of interest that has drawn them together.

Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews were well over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating

bluntness, a pronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm the suspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it was genuine. Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsy friends very likely stood first—outside, of course, his family circle. And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstanding certain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are the only people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity (perhaps because they are not British). It is no less an honour to them, for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentleman than him they called the “Romany Rye.”