Lavengro | Page 9

humorous mystery of Man's personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Borrow, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.
"You are an Englishman?" said Borrow.
"Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman," I said, using a phrase of his own in "Lavengro"--"if not a thorough East Anglian an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good."
"Nearly," said Borrow.
And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine "Shales mare," a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair, and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart--an East Anglian dogcart--when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea water to swim in--when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was "the glassy Ouse" of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast, and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore" was complete, and from that moment we became friends.
Hake meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Borrow whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea-waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.
"It is on sand alone," said Borrow, "that the sea strikes its true music--Norfolk sand: a rattle is not music."
"The best of the sea's lutes," I said, "is made by the sands of Cromer."
I have read over to my beloved old friend Dr. Hake, the above meagre account of that my first delightful ramble with Borrow. He whose memory lets nothing escape, has reminded me of a score of interesting things said and done on that memorable occasion. But in putting into print any record of one's intercourse with a famous man, there is always an unpleasant sense of lapsing into egotism. And besides, the reader has very likely had enough now of talk between Borrow and me.

X. THE FUTURE OF BORROW'S WORKS.
He whom London once tried hard, but in vain, to lionise, lived during some of the last years of his life in Hereford Square, unknown to any save about a dozen friends. At the head of them stood Mr. John Murray, whose virtues, both as publisher and as English gentleman, he was never tired of extolling.
Afterwards he went down to East Anglia--that East Anglia he loved so well--went there, as he told me, to die.
But it was not till one day in 1881 that Borrow achieved, in the Cottage by the Oulton Broads which his genius once made famous, and where so much of his best work had been written, the soul's great conquest over its fleshly trammels, the conquest we call death, but which he believed to be life. His body was laid by the side of that of his wife at Brompton.
When I wrote his obituary notice in the Athenaeum no little wonder was expressed in various quarters that the "Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore" had been walking so lately the earth.
And yet his "Bible in Spain" had still a regular sale. His "Lavengro" and "Romany Rye" were still allowed by all competent critics to be among the most delightful books in the language. Indeed, at his death, Borrow was what he now is, and what he will continue to be long after Time has played havoc with nine-tenths of the writers whose names are week by week, and day by day, "paragraphed" in the papers as "literary celebrities"--an English classic.
Apart from Borrow's undoubted genius as a writer the subject-matter of his writings has an interest that will not wane but will go on growing. The more the features of our "Beautiful England," to use his own phrase, are changed by the multitudinous effects of the railway system, the more attraction will readers find in books which depict her before her beauty was marred--books which depict her in those antediluvian days when there was such a thing as space in the island--when in England there was a sense