Isopel Berners | Page 4

night in
the open air in a Shropshire dell; on June 5th he is visited by Leonora
Herne, the grandchild of the old "brimstone hag" who was jealous of
the cordiality with which the young stranger had been received by the
Petulengroes and initiated in the secrets of their gipsy tribe. Three days
later, betrayed to the old woman by Leonora, he is drabbed (i.e.
poisoned) with the manricli or doctored cake of Mrs. Herne; his life is
in imminent danger, but he is saved by the opportune arrival of Peter
Williams. He passes Sunday, June 12th, with the Welsh preacher and
his wife Winifred; on the 21st he departs with his itinerant hosts to the
Welsh border. Before entering Wales, however, he turns back with
Ambrose ("Jasper") Petulengro and settles with his own stock-in-trade
as tinker and blacksmith at the foot of the dingle hard by Mumper's
Lane, near Willenhall, in Staffordshire; here at the end of June 1825
takes place the classical encounter between the philologer and the
flaming tinman--all this, is it not related in Lavengro, and substantiated
with much hard labour of facts and dates by Dr. W. I. Knapp in his
exhaustive biography of George Borrow? The allurement of his genius
is such that the etymologist shall leave his roots and the philologer his

Maeso-Gothic to take to the highway and dwell in the dingle with "Don
Jorge."
Lavengro's triumph over the flaming tinman is the prelude to what
Professor Saintsbury justly calls "the miraculous episode of Ysopel
Berners," and the narrative of the author's life is thence continued, with
many digressions, but with a remarkable fidelity to fact as far as the
main issue is concerned, until the narrative, though not the life- story of
the author, abruptly terminates at Horncastle, in August 1825. There
follows what is spoken of as the veiled period of Borrow's life, from
1826 to 1833.
The years in which we drift are generally veiled from posterity. The
system of psychometry carried to such perfection by Obermann and
Amiel could at no time have been exactly congenial to Borrow, who
spoke of himself at this period as "digging holes in the sand and filling
them up again." Roughly speaking, the years appear to have been spent
comparatively uneventfully, for the most part in Norfolk. In December
1832 he walked to London to interview the British and Foreign Bible
Society, covering a hundred and twelve miles in twenty-seven hours on
less than sixpennyworth of food and drink. He was thirty years old at
the time, and the achievement was the pride of his remaining years. Six
months later, on the strength of his linguistic attainments, he managed
to get on the paid staff of the Society, to the bewilderment of Norwich
"friends," who were inclined to be ironical on the subject of the
transformation of the chum of hanged Thurtell and the disciple of
godless Billy Taylor into a Bible missionary. In July 1833, then,
Borrow sets out on his Eastern travels as the accredited agent of the
Bible Society, goes to St. Petersburg, "the finest city in the world," and
obtains the Russian imprimatur for a Manchu version of that suspicious
novelty, the Bible. He carried this scheme into execution to the general
satisfaction, and he returns to London in 1837; then to the south of
Europe, whence he reappears, larger than life and twice as natural, in
his masterly autobiographical romance of The Bible in Spain, the work
which made his name, which was sold by thousands, which was
eagerly acclaimed as an invaluable addition to "Sunday" literature, and
pirated in a generous spirit of emulation by American publishers.

We are now come to the circumstance of the composition of Lavengro.
The Bible in Spain, when it appeared in 1843, implied a wonderful
background to the Author's experience, a career diversified by all kinds
of wild adventures, "sorcery, Jews, Gentiles, rambles," gipsies,
prisons,--what you will. {12}
The personal element in the book--so suggestive of mystery and
romance--excited the strongest curiosity. Apart from this, however, the
reading public of 1843 were not unnaturally startled by a book which
seemed to profess to be a good, serious, missionary work, but for which
it was manifest that Gil Blas and not Bishop Heber had been taken as a
model. Not that any single comparison of the kind can convey the least
idea of the complex idiosyncrasy of such a work. There is a substratum
of Guide Book and Gil Blas, no doubt, but there are unmistakable
streaks of Defoe, of Dumas, and of Dickens, with all his native
prejudices and insular predilections strong upon him. A narrative so
wide awake amidst a vagrant population of questionable morals and
alien race suggests an affinity with Hajji Baba (a close kinsman, we
conceive, of the