The rogues will never come back! A feeling of disappointment is apt to come over us as we read, and we are ready to stop and ask angrily, 'Why can't we drop in among the tents, and see an Ursula or a Pakomovna, and have our fortunes told as of yore ?' And we know that it cannot be, and that the Romany Rye is a being who lived and moved in a different age from ours, as different as the age of Hector and Achilles, when warriors fought in their chariots round the walls of Troy, and the long-haired Achaians hurled their spears and stole one another's horses in the darkness, and kings made long speeches armed to the teeth, and ran away with other kings' wives or multiplied their own.

We go on to confess to ourselves that we must be content with hearing about all the strange experience of the Romany Rye at second-hand, and since it must be so, we shall do well to surrender ourselves to such a magician as this and make the best of it." {38} After the publication of the _Romany Rye_ in 1857, Borrow made one more contribution to Belles Lettres in the book called _Wild Wales_, issued in three volumes in 1862.

It commemorates a journey made in the summer of 1854, while its heroic championship of the Bardic literature recalls the earlier enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym.

If after his return from Spain a definite sphere of activity abroad could have been allotted to Borrow (by preference in the East, as he himself desired), we might have had from his pen contributions to the study of Eastern life that would have added lustre to a group of writers already brilliantly represented in England by Curzon and Kinglake, Lane and Morier, Palgrave and Burton.

With Burton's love of roving adventure, of strange tongues, and of anthropology in its widest sense, the author of the _Bible in Spain_ had many points in common.