Lavengro is the history up to a certain period of one of rather a
peculiar mind and system of nerves, with an exterior shy and cold,
under which lurk much curiosity, especially with regard to what is
wild and extraordinary, a considerable quantity of energy and
industry, and an unconquerable love of independence. It narrates
his earliest dreams and feelings, dwells with minuteness on the
ways, words, and characters of his father, mother, and brother,
lingers on the occasional resting-places of his wandering half
military childhood, describes the gradual hardening of his bodily
frame by robust exercises, his successive struggles, after his
family and himself have settled down in a small local capital, to
obtain knowledge of every kind, but more particularly philological
lore; his visits to the tent of the Romany chal, and the parlour of
the Anglo-German philosopher; the effect produced upon his
character by his flinging himself into contact with people all
widely differing from each other, but all extraordinary; his
reluctance to settle down to the ordinary pursuits of life; his
struggles after moral truth; his glimpses of God and the
obscuration of the Divine Being, to his mind's eye; and his being
cast upon the world of London by the death of his father, at the
age of nineteen.
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