Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die ?' Yes, or to live cribbed, cabined, and confined in a London square! No wonder 'Lavengro' felt cross and uncomfortable.

Nor did he take much pleasure in the society of the other lions of the hour, least of all of such a lion as Sir John Bowring, M.P.

Was not Bowring 'Lavengro' as much as Borrow himself?
Had he not--for there was no end to his impudence--travelled in Spain, and 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.