e to bear. Lamb
would parade his admiration for some favourite author, Donne, for
example, whom the rest of the company probably abhorred. He would
select the most crabbed passages to quote and defend; he would
stammer out his piquant and masterful half sentences, his scalding
jests, his controvertible assertions; he would skilfully hint at the
defects which no one else was permitted to see; and if he made no
converts (wanting none), he woke no weary wrath. But we all have a
sneaking sympathy for Holcroft, who, when Coleridge was expatiating
rapturously and oppressively upon the glories of German
transcendental philosophy, and upon his own supreme command of the
field, cried out suddenly and with exceeding bitterness: "Mr.
Coleridge, you are the most eloquent man I ever met, and the most
unbearable in your eloquence."

I am not without a lurking suspicion that George Borrow must have
been at times unbearable in his eloquence. "We cannot refuse to meet
a man on the ground that he is an enthusiast," observes Mr. George
Street, obviously lamenting this circumstance; "but we should at
least like to make sure that his enthusiasms are under control."
Borrow's enthusiasms were never under control. He stood ready at a
moment's notice to prove the superiority of the Welsh bards over the
paltry poets of England, or to relate the marvellous Welsh prophecies,
so vague as to be always safe. He was capable of inflicting Armenian
verbs upon Isopel Berners when they sat at night over their gipsy
kettle in the dingle (let us hope she fell asleep as sweetly as does
Milton's Eve when Adam grows too garrulous); and he met the
complaints of a poor farmer on the hardness of the times with jubilant
praises of evangelicalism. "Better pay three pounds an acre, and live
on crusts and water in the present enlightened days," he told the
disheartened husbandman, "than pay two shillings an acre, and sit
down to beef and ale three times a day in the old superstitious ages."
This is _not_ the oratory of conviction. There are unreasoning
prejudices in favour of one's own stomach which eloquence cannot
gainsay. "I defy the utmost power of language to disgust me wi' a
gude denner," observes the Ettrick Shepherd; thus putting on record
the attitude of the bucolic mind, impassive, immutable, since
earth's first harvests were gleaned.

The artificial emotions which expand under provocation, and collapse
when the provocation is withdrawn, must be held res