actually published a pamphlet in the vernacular? Was he not meditating
translations from a score of languages he said he knew? Was he not,
furthermore, an old Radical and Republican turned genteel? Were not his
wife and daughters more than half suspected of being Jacobites, followers
of the Reverend Mr. Platitude, and addicted to 'Charley o'er the
Waterism'? Borrow did not get on with Bowring.

When Borrow shook the dust of London off his feet, and returned into
Norfolk with _Lavengro_ barely begun on his hands, he carried away with
him into his retreat the antipathies and prejudices, the whimsical
dislikes and the half-real, half-sham disappointments and chagrins which
London, that fertile mother of megrims, had bred in him, and dropped them
all into the ink with which he wrote his famous book. Gentility he
forswore. Whatever else Lavengro might turn out, genteel he was not to
be; and sure enough, when Lavengro made his appearance in 1851 genteel he
most certainly was not.

There was not the same public to welcome the Gypsy as had hailed the
Colporteur. The pious phrases which had garnished so plentifully the
earlier book had now almost wholly disappeared. There is no evidence
that Lavengro ever offered Petulengro a Bible. Even the denunciations of
Popery have a dubious sound. What is sometimes called 'the religious
world' were no longer buyers of Borrow. Nor was 'the polite world' much
better pleased. The polite reader was both puzzled and annoyed. First
of all: Was the book true--autobiography or romance? A polite reader
objects to be made a fool of. One De Foe in a couple of centuries is
enough for a polite reader. Then the glorification of ale and of gypsies
and prize-fighters--would it not be better at once to dub the book
vulgar, and so have done with it for ever? An ill-regulated book, a
strange book, a mad book, a book which condemns the world's way. If I