we shall do well to surrender ourselves to such a magician as this and
make the best of it." {38}

After the publication of the _Romany Rye_ in 1857, Borrow made one more
contribution to Belles Lettres in the book called _Wild Wales_, issued in
three volumes in 1862. It commemorates a journey made in the summer of
1854, while its heroic championship of the Bardic literature recalls the
earlier enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym. If after his return from Spain a
definite sphere of activity abroad could have been allotted to Borrow (by
preference in the East, as he himself desired), we might have had from
his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added
lustre to a group of writers already brilliantly represented in England
by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton. With
Burton's love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of
anthropology in its widest sense, the author of the _Bible in Spain_ had
many points in common. As it was, the later years of Borrow's life were
spent somewhat moodily, and with some of the mystery of Swift's or of
Rousseau's, at Oulton, near Lowestoft, whence, at Christmas 1874, he sent
a message to the neighbouring hermit, Edward Fitzgerald at Woodbridge, in
the vain hope of eliciting a visit. {39a} His wife, who had been won
with her widow's jointure and dower during the flush of his missionary
successes in 1840, died at the end of January 1869, {39b} and on July
26th, 1881, after years spent in a strange seclusion at Oulton, tended
latterly by his step-daughter Henrietta, George Borrow was found dead in
his bed, dying as he had lived, alone. Not long after his death, which
took place when he was seventy-eight, Borrow's Oulton home was pulled
down. All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the
old summer-house in which he wrote _Lavengro_, and the ragged fir-trees
that sighed the requiem of his last hours. Without appealing to "the
shires," but in the Eastern counties alone, he has been commemorated