ux que j'ai faits
seul et a pied. La marche a quelque chose qui anime et avive mes
idees: je ne puis presque penser quand je reste en place; il faut que
mon corps soit en branle pour y mettre mon esprit. La vue de la
campagne, la succession des aspects agreables, le grand air, le grand
appetit, la bonne sante que je gagne en marchant, la liberte du
cabaret, l'eloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dependance, de
tout ce qui me rappelle a ma situation: tout cela degage mon ame."

It is a possession in a rare degree of this wonderful open-air quality as
a writer that constrains us in our generation to condone any offences
against the mint and anise and cummin decrees of literary infallibility
that Borrow may have from time to time committed. And when it is
realised, in addition, what a unique knowledge he possessed of the daily
life, the traditions, the folk-lore, and the dialects of the strange
races of vagrants, forming such a picturesque element in the life of the
road, the documentary value, as apart from the literary interest of
Borrow's work, becomes more and more manifest.

_Lavengro_ is not a book, it is true, to open sesame to the first comer,
or to yield up one tithe of its charm upon a first acquaintance. Yet, in
spite of the "foaming vipers," as Borrow styles his critics, _Lavengro's_
roots have already struck deep into the soil of English literature, as
Dr. Hake predicted that they would. {37} We know something about the dim
retreating Arcady from Dr. Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers
and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian
London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs.
Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties
from George Eliot. It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild
Nature on the roadside and the heath.

"The personages in these inimitable books are not merely snap-shots,
they are living pictures; and, more than that, the people are moving
about amid fluttering leaves and flickering sunlight and waves of
shadow and rippling brooks. One neither misses the colours of the
landscapes nor the very sounds of the voices. Moreover, the
characters, though we feel that they have never come within the range
of our experience, yet did actually live and move and talk as they are
represented; and we know, too, that such characters have passed away