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By a curious contradiction, the tendency is to overlook literary lapses in the very man towards whom so little latitude was allowed in other directions. Many Borrovians have groaned in anguish over his misuse of that wretched word "Individual." Another critic, and a severe one, has written:
This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of Borrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a good many Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two such men to understand each other.
Some dismiss the whole story as apocryphal; others see in it a grain of truth distorted into something of vital importance; whilst there are a number of earnest Borrovians that accept the whole story as it is written. Dr Knapp has said that Joseph Sell "was not a book at all, and the author of it never said that it was."
He had always had a fancy for the class, though he had never known anything nearer it than city beggars. He pictured them as philosophic vagabonds, full of quaint turns of speech, unconscious Borrovians. With these samples his disillusionment was speedy. The party was made up of a ferret-faced man with a red nose, a draggle-tailed woman, and a child in a crazy perambulator.
His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph,’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s.” On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behind that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.
On reflection, he thought the choice a safe one, and his reply left his adviser undisturbed in her conviction that she was admitting him into the select circle of Borrovians. "The recommendation goes," he said. "Not," he corrected himself, "that I would not have purchased it upon yours alone, Mrs. Parr." "Oh, I'm not vain of my knowledge of books," she assured him.
If he had been caught by Dissenters, as he should have been, he might by this time have had salvation, and an occupation for life, in founding a new truculent sect of Borrovians. As the Rev. the Romany Rye he might have blazed in an entertaining and becoming manner.
Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things that Borrovians would be loth to lose. Borrow’s defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style, it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy.
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