novelist, yet Miss Edgeworth was born in England of English
parentage. Nevertheless, she was quite as much an Irish novelist as
Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, for all her life was spent in direct
communion with the Irish race, and her books were Irish books. It is, on
the other hand, quite unreasonable to deny that Charlotte Bronte was a
Yorkshire woman. Only once at the end of her life did she visit Ireland
for a few weeks. Her Irish father and her Cornish mother doubtless
influenced her nature in many ways, but not less certain was the
influence of those wonderful moors around Haworth, and the people among
whom she lived. Neither Ireland nor Cornwall has as much right to claim
her as Yorkshire. I am the last to disclaim the influence of what is
sometimes called "Celticism" upon English literature; upon this point I
am certain that Matthew Arnold has said almost the last word. The
Celts--not necessarily the Irish, as there are three or four races of
Celts in addition to the Irish--have in the main given English literature
its fine imaginative quality, and even where he cannot trace a Celtic
origin to an English writer we may fairly assume that there is Celtic
blood somewhere in an earlier generation.

Nevertheless, the impressions, as I have said, derived from environment
are of the utmost vitality, and assuredly Borrow was an East Anglian, as
Sir Thomas Browne was an East Anglian. In each writer you can trace the
influence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow.
Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In
_Lavengro_, I venture to assert, we have the greatest example of prose
style in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrow
cult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side of
Borrow--his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example--as was the
popularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was a
magnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced by
environment. Charles Kingsley, for example, who came from quite
different surroundings, was profoundly influenced by the East Anglian fen-
country:--

"They have a beauty of their own, those great fens," he said, "a
beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the
arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness
gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen
nowhere else within t