ike Borrow should magnify and should misinterpret this unexpected
blow.

The attitude of his critics was due to a very complex system of causes.
The English have always been the most self-complacent of peoples, and
1851 was perhaps the one year in the whole of our history when this
little weakness reached its climax. The Oxford Movement, with Newman and
Ward as its prophets, had been succeeded by the Manchester Movement, upon
which Cobden and Macaulay had long been busily engaged in shedding the
most brilliant rays of the prevailing Whig optimism; factories, railways,
penny postage, free trade, commercial expansion, universal peace and
plenty, industrial exhibitions, religious toleration, general
education--these were the watchwords of the day, and all these things
alike were repulsive in the highest degree to George Borrow. He was as
conservative as a gipsy or a tramp, while his hatred of novelty was
worthy of the race among whom _Vaya usted con Dios_, _y que no haya
Novedad_! is a common form of valediction. His hatred of aesthetic
culture, of sentimental toleration, and of the modern woman amounted to a
positive mania. Of the great writers of his own century he never spoke
unless it were to condemn, as in the case of Scott, Wordsworth,
Thackeray, and Keats, of whom he once asked, "Have they not been trying
to resuscitate him?" In his conversations with Agnes Strickland and Miss
Cobbe, as recorded by the latter, he appears to have behaved like an
escaped lunatic, while, upon the occasion of his meeting with Anna
Gurney, we know that he literally took to flight and ran without stopping
from Sheringham to the Old Tucker's Inn at Cromer. An interview with
Mrs. Browning or George Eliot would have probably driven him stark
staring mad. Another stumbling block to the critics of 1851 was the
peculiar dryness, if we may so describe it, of Borrow's style. He could
respond to the thrill of natural beauty. He could enjoy and find
utterance for his mood when it came upon him, just as he could enjoy a
tankard of old ale or linger to gaze upon a sympathetic face; but he
refused to pamper such feelings, still more to simulate them; he refused
to allow himself to become the creature of literary or poetic ecstasy; he
refused to indulge in the fashionable debauch of _dilettante_ melancholy.
His life was in many ways the reverse of normal, but he insisted in
writing about it quite naturally, "as if there were nothing in it." It