{picture: Ned Turner, Tom Cribb: page253.jpg}




CHAPTER XXVII--BORROW AND LOW LIFE


"Lavengro" in 1851 and "The Romany Rye" in 1857 failed to impress the
critics or the public. Men were disappointed because "Lavengro" was "not
an autobiography." They said that the adventures did not bear "the
impress of truth." They suggested that the anti-Papistry was "added and
interpolated to suit the occasion of the recent Papal aggression." They
laughed at its mystery-making. They said that it gave "a false dream in
the place of reality." Ford regretted that Borrow had "told so little
about himself." Two friends praised it and foretold long life for it.
Whitwell Elwin in 1857 said that "the truth and vividness of the
descriptions both of scenes and persons, coupled with the purity, force
and simplicity of the language, should confer immortality upon many of
its pages." "The Saturday Review" found that he had humour and romance,
and that his writing left "a general impression of the scenery and
persons introduced so strongly vivid and life-like," that it reminded
them of Defoe rather than of any contemporary author; they called the
books a "strange cross between a novel and an autobiography." In 1857
also, Emile Montegut wrote a study of "The Gypsy Gentleman," which he
published in his "Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre." He said that
Borrow had revived a neglected literary form, not artificially, but as
being the natural frame for the scenes of his wandering life: he even
went so far as to say that the form and manner of the picaresque or rogue