haracter. Cobbett is neglected
(unfortunately) as a publicist and pamphleteer, but he is remembered as
a Character. Now these people continued to crop up through the Victorian
time; and each stands so much by himself that I shall end these pages
with a profound suspicion that I have forgotten to mention a Character
of gigantic dimensions. Perhaps the best example of such eccentrics is
George Borrow; who sympathised with unsuccessful nomads like the gipsies
while every one else sympathised with successful nomads like the Jews;
who had a genius like the west wind for the awakening of wild and casual
friendships and the drag and attraction of the roads. But whether George
Borrow ought to go into the section devoted to philosophers, or the
section devoted to novelists, or the section devoted to liars, nobody
else has ever known, even if he did.

But the strongest case of this Victorian power of being abruptly
original in a corner can be found in two things: the literature meant
merely for children and the literature meant merely for fun. It is true
that these two very Victorian things often melted into each other (as
was the way of Victorian things), but not sufficiently to make it safe
to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George
Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write
fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the
real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at
last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But
such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the
Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new
thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing was
really invented to please children. Rather it was invented by old
people trying to prove their first childhood, and sometimes succeeding
only in proving their second. But whatever else the thing was, it was
English and it was individual. Lewis Carroll gave mathematics a holiday:
he carried logic into the wild lands of illogicality. Edward Lear, a
richer, more romantic and therefore more truly Victorian buffoon,
improved the experiment. But the more we study it, the more we shall, I
think, conclude that it reposed on something more real and profound in
the Victorians than even their just and exquisite appreciation of
children. It came from the deep Victorian sense of humour.

It may appear, becaus