ssed a great liking for his "Lives and Trials"--how full
were the Lives "of wild and racy adventures, and in what racy, genuine
language they were told." These words are closely applicable to Borrow's
own writings; many of the critics fell foul of them, though Lockhart said
Borrow had "a true eye for the picturesque, and a fund of real racy
humour," while Elwin, fourteen years later (1857), praised his
descriptions "as accurate as they are picturesque. They abound in
dramatic and delicate strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an
adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and
prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of
verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His
descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little
later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all
read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the worse than
Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism." Mr. Saintsbury, one of our
foremost literary essayists, while asserting, in 1886, that Borrow was
not a popular author, stated that "his works greatly influenced
Longfellow and Merimee, especially the latter." Blackwood naturally
disliked Borrow, said gypsies constituted nine-tenths of his
stock-in-trade, and that his chief credential to London was a letter from
"an eccentric German teacher"! To-day where will you find a competent
scholarly critic who is not a whole-hearted admirer of Borrow's style?
His grave and gay pictures of persons and places, are etched in with
instinctive faithfulness, and clarity of atmosphere; always excepting
such characters as were under the ban of his capricious hatred: "Mr.
Flamson," "the Old Radical," Scott and his "gentility nonsense," and so
forth. It is doubtful if any but lovers of the open road, can thoroughly
enter into the Borrow fellowship, but only such as Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr.
Hilaire Belloc, of the comity of wayfaring men--initiates in the
charities of the roads--men who love the dewy perfume of the meadows when
the day is young, the blazing splendours of noon on the highway, and the
magic of moonlight in many a dale, on many a hill. Men, moreover, who
find nothing "low" in listening to the tapestried talk of wayside
taverns, where, indeed, even to-day many a scrap of folk-lore and remnant
of age-old superstitions may be learned. The spirit of Borrow has
inspired and evolved the noble ar