struggles not greatly relaxed in severity since the days of Newbery,
Gardener and Christopher Smart. As the genius of Hawthorne was cooped up
and enslaved for the American "Peter Parley," so that of Borrow was hag-
ridden by a bookseller publisher of an even worse type, the radical
alderman and philanthropic sweater, Sir Richard Phillipps. For this
stony-hearted faddist he covered reams of paper with printers' copy; and
we are told that the kind of compilation that he liked (and probably
executed) best was that of _Newgate Lives and Trials_. He had well-nigh
reached the end of his tether when he had the conversation with
Phillipps's head factotum, Taggart, which we cite below and recommend
feelingly to the consideration of every literary aspirant. Sordid and
commonplace enough are the details; simple and free from every kind of
inflation the language in which they are narrated. Yet how picturesque
are these vignettes of London life! How vivid and yet how strange are
the figures that animate them! The harsh literary impresario with his
"drug in the market," who seems to have stalked straight out of Smollett,
{8} the gnarled old applewoman, with every wrinkle shown, on her stall
upon London Bridge, the grasping Armenian merchant who softened at the
sound of his native tongue, the giddy young spendthrift Francis Ardry and
the confiding young creature who had permitted him to hire her a very
handsome floor in the West End, the gipsies and thimble-riggers in
Greenwich Park--what moving and lifelike figures are these, stippled in
with a seeming absence of art, yet as strange and as rare as a Night in
Bagdad, a chapter of Balzac, or the most fantastic scene in the _New
Arabian Nights_.

This brief recapitulation--in which it has been possible but just to
touch upon a few of the inner springs of Borrow's life as revealed in the
autobiographical _Lavengro_--brings us once again to that spring day in
1825--May 20th--when the author disposed of an unidentifiable manuscript