As it was, the later years of Borrow's life were spent somewhat moodily, and with some of the mystery of Swift's or of Rousseau's, at Oulton, near Lowestoft, whence, at Christmas 1874, he sent a message to the neighbouring hermit, Edward Fitzgerald at Woodbridge, in the vain hope of eliciting a visit.

{39a} His wife, who had been won with her widow's jointure and dower during the flush of his missionary successes in 1840, died at the end of January 1869, {39b} and on July 26th, 1881, after years spent in a strange seclusion at Oulton, tended latterly by his step-daughter Henrietta, George Borrow was found dead in his bed, dying as he had lived, alone.

Not long after his death, which took place when he was seventy-eight, Borrow's Oulton home was pulled down.

All that now remains to mark the spot where it once stood are the old summer-house in which he wrote _Lavengro_, and the ragged fir-trees that sighed the requiem of his last hours.

Without appealing to "the shires," but in the Eastern counties alone, he has been commemorated since his death by such writers as Henry Dutt, and Whitwell Elwin, by Egmont Hake, by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and by Dr.Jessopp.