al absence in
Borrow of the sentimentality for which the soul of the normal Englishman
yearns. Fifthly, disappointment at not finding the critic's due from an
accepted author in quotable passages of picturesque prose.

These views are appropriately summed up through the medium of the pure
and scentless taste of the _Athenaeum_. The varied contents of
_Lavengro_ are here easily reduced to one denomination--'balderdash,' for
the emission of which the _Athenaeum_ critic proceeds (in the interests,
of course, of the highest gentility), to give George Borrow a good
scolding.

How sadly removed was such procedure from Borrow's own ideal of
reviewing, as set forth in the very volume under consideration! Such
operations should always, he held, be conducted in a spirit worthy of an
editor of Quintilian, in a gentlemanly, Oxford-like manner. No
vituperation! No insinuations! Occasionally a word of admonition, but
gently expressed as an Oxford M.A. might have expressed it. Some one had
ventured to call the _Bible in Spain_ a grotesque book, but the utterance
had been drowned in the chorus of acclamation. Now Borrow complained
that he had had the honour of being rancorously abused by every unmanly
scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and every political and religious
renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by
a swarm of gnats. His worst passions were aroused; his most violent
prejudices confirmed. His literary zeal, never extremely alert, was
sensibly diminished.

This last result at least was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end
had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through
the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked
footprint on the sand. The 'great unknown' had gone down beneath his
associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large
extent revealed _himself_--a primitive man, with his breast by no means
wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem
of a complex humanity: an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone
gives savour to the wearisome process of "civilisation." For the
conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected
by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute
the _genus homo_ of natural history. Perhaps it was only to be expected
that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should
be received wit