the other. To any one
who, having the faculty to understand either, has read _Lavengro_ or
_The Bible in Spain_, or even _Wild Wales_, praise bestowed on Borrow is
apt to seem impertinence. To anybody else (and unfortunately the anybody
else is in a large majority) praise bestowed on Borrow is apt to look
like that very dubious kind of praise which is bestowed on somebody of
whom no one but the praiser has ever heard. I cannot think of any single
writer (Peacock himself is not an exception) who is in quite parallel
case. And, as usual, there is a certain excuse for the general public.
Borrow kept himself, during not the least exciting period of English
history, quite aloof from English politics, and from the life of great
English cities. But he did more than this. He is the only really
considerable writer of his time in any modern European nation who seems
to have taken absolutely no interest in current events, literary and
other. Putting a very few allusions aside, he might have belonged to
almost any period. His political idiosyncrasy will be noticed presently;
but he, who lived through the whole period from Waterloo to Maiwand, has
not, as far as I remember, mentioned a single English writer later than
Scott and Byron. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of
Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. There is not a
reference to any one of them in his works. He saw political changes such
as no man for two centuries had seen, and (except the Corn Laws, to
which he has some half-ironical allusions, and the Ecclesiastical Titles
Bill, which stirred his one active sentiment) he has referred to never a
one. He seems in some singular fashion to have stood outside of all
these things. His Spanish travels are dated for us by references to Dona
Isabel and Don Carlos, to Mr. Villiers and Lord Palmerston. But cut
these dates out, and they might be travels of the last century. His
Welsh book proclaims itself as written in the full course of the
Crimean War; but excise a few passages which bear directly on that
event, and the most ingenious critic would be puzzled to "place" the
composition. Shakespeare, we know, was for all time, not of one age
only; but I think we may say of Borrow, without too severely or
conceitedly marking the difference, that he was not of or for any
particular age or time at all. If the celebrated query in Longfellow's
_Hyperion_, "What is time?" had been addressed to him, his most
appro