h a howl of incredulity.

Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day
Emile Montegut realised _to the full_ the true greatness, the
originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow's work. Writing
in September 1857 upon "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears
in his _Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre_, between studies on "Mistress
Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic
Odyssey":--

"Unfinished and fragmentary, these writings can dispense with a
conclusion, for they have an intrinsic value, and each page bears the
impress of reality. The critic who has to give his impressions of one
of Borrow's books is in much the same case as a critic who had to give
his impressions in turn of the different parts of _Gil Blas_ as they
successively appeared. The work is incomplete, but each several part
is excellent and can be appreciated by itself. Borrow has
resuscitated a literary form which had been many years abandoned, and
he has resuscitated it in no artificial manner--as a rhythmical form
is rehabilitated, or as a dilettante re-establishes for a moment the
vogue of the roundel or the virelay--but quite naturally as the
inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and
the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and
unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and,
above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral
code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and
manner of the _novela picaresca_.

"The huge sensational romance [Sue], the creaking machinery of
melodrama [Boucicault], with which it has been attempted in our own
day to portray certain tableaux of the life of the people, only
succeed, owing to the extravagance of their construction, in
demonstrating the complete ignorance on the part of the writers of the
subject which they pretend to describe. Borrow has not of set purpose
adopted the picaresque form: search his pages where you will, you will
find not a trace of such an intention. He has rediscovered the
picaresque method, as it were instinctively, by the mere fact of his
having to express sentiments of a certain description; he has indeed
rediscovered it by the same process which led Cervantes and Hurtado de
Mendoza to invent it--by virtue of that necessity whi