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Updated: June 13, 2025
In a word Borrow was content to give us the wonderful, without taking that trouble to find for it a logical basis which a literary master would have taken. And instances might easily be multiplied of this exaggeration of Borrow's, which is apt to lend a sense of unreality to some of the most picturesque pages of 'Lavengro." But would Mr.
The book is a harmless picaresque, a geste of innocent rogue-errantry; its place is with Lavengro and The Cloister and the Hearth, in that ancient, endless order of tales which link up age with age and land with land in the unaltering, unfrontiered fellowship of the road that kept the spirit of poetry alive through the Dark Ages.
People say of a chapter or of a character: 'This is very wonderful, IF TRUE; but if fiction it is pointless. Will your new volumes explain this and dissolve the mystery? If so, pray make haste and get on with them. I hope you have employed the summer in giving them the finishing touches." Borrow's own generation would have laughed at such a value being put upon anything in Lavengro.
I did not like reviewing at all it was not to my taste; it was not in my way; I liked it far less than translating the publisher's philosophy, for that was something in the line of one whom a competent judge had surnamed "Lavengro". I never could understand why reviews were instituted; works of merit do not require to be reviewed, they can speak for themselves, and require no praising; works of no merit at all will die of themselves, they require no killing.
This is one of the pseudo-Radical calumniators of Lavengro and its author; were the writer on his deathbed he would lay his hand on his heart and say, that he does not believe that there is one trait of exaggeration in the portrait which he has drawn.
He proves also from newspapers of 1820 that the fight, in the twenty sixth chapter of "Lavengro," ended in a thunderstorm like that described by Borrow and used by Petulengro to forecast the violent end of Thurtell. Now a brute memory like that, which cannot be gainsaid, is not an entirely good servant to a man who will not put down everything he can, like a boy at an examination.
But at the end of the year it was "Lavengro: the Scholar the Gypsy the Priest," and with that title it appeared early in 1851. Borrow was then forty-six years old, and the third volume of his book left him still in the dingle beside the great north road, when he was, according to the conversation with Mr. Petulengro, a young man of twenty-one.
It was hardly these little things that kept Borrow working at "Lavengro" for nearly half of his fourth decade and a full half of his fifth. But these little things were part of the great difficulty of making an harmonious whole by changing, cutting out and inserting.
There are many species of nonsense to which the nation is much addicted, and of which the perusal of Lavengro ought to give them a wholesome shame. First of all, with respect to the foreign nonsense so prevalent now in England.
After many painful experiences in London, whither he went in the hope of being able to gain a livelihood by devoting himself to literature, George Borrow turned his back upon the metropolis, and set out on that wild, rambling excursion narrated and enlarged upon in the pages of “Lavengro.” Lapse of time has emphasised the impossibility of ascertaining how much is fact and how much fiction in the fascinating account of his wanderings.
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