I shall not try, to deface Borrow's portrait of himself; I can only hope
that I shall not do it by accident. There may be a sense in which that
portrait can be called inaccurate. It may even be true that "lies--damned
lies" {1} helped to make it. But nobody else knows anything like as much
about the truth, and a peddling biographer's mouldy fragment of plain
fact may be far more dangerous than the manly lying of one who was in
possession of all the facts. In most cases the fact--to use an equivocal
term--is dead and blown away in dust while Borrow's impression is as
green as grass. His "lies" are lies only in the same sense as all
clothing is a lie.

For example, he knew a Gypsy named Ambrose Smith, and had sworn
brotherhood with him as a boy. He wrote about this Gypsy, man and boy,
and at first called him, as the manuscripts bear witness, by his real
name, though Borrow thought of him in 1842 as Petulengro. In print he
was given the name Jasper Petulengro--Petulengro being Gypsy for
shoesmith--and as Jasper Petulengro he is now one of the most
unforgetable of heroes; the name is the man, and for many Englishmen his
form and character have probably created quite a new value for the name
of Jasper. Well, Jasper Petulengro lives. Ambrose Smith died in 1878,
at the age of seventy-four, after being visited by the late Queen
Victoria at Knockenhair Park: he was buried in Dunbar Cemetery. {2}

In the matter of his own name Borrow made another creative change of a
significant kind. He was christened George Henry Borrow on July 17th
(having been born on the 5th), 1803, at East Dereham, in Norfolk. As a
boy he signed his name, George Henry Borrow. As a young man of the
Byronic age and a translator of Scandinavian literature, he called
himself in print, George Olaus Borrow. His biographer, Dr. William
Ireland Knapp, says that Borrow's first name "expressed the father's