priate answer, and one which he was quite capable of giving, would
have been, "I really don't know."

To this singular historical vagueness has to be added a critical
vagueness even greater. I am sorry that I am unable to confirm or to
gainsay at first hand Borrow's wonderfully high estimate of certain
Welsh poets. But if the originals are anything like his translations of
them, I do not think that Ab Gwilym and Lewis Glyn Cothi, Gronwy Owen
and Huw Morris can have been quite such mighty bards as he makes out.
Fortunately, however, a better test presents itself. In one book of his,
_Wild Wales_, there are two estimates of Scott's works. Borrow finds in
an inn a copy of _Woodstock_ (which he calls by its less known title of
_The Cavalier_), and decides that it is "trashy": chiefly, it would
appear, because the portrait therein contained of Harrison, for whom
Borrow seems, on one of his inscrutable principles of prejudice, to
have had a liking, is not wholly favourable. He afterwards informs us
that Scott's "Norman Horseshoe" (no very exquisite song at the best, and
among Scott's somewhat less than exquisite) is "one of the most stirring
lyrics of modern times," and that he sang it for a whole evening;
evidently because it recounts a defeat of the Normans, whom Borrow, as
he elsewhere tells us in sundry places, disliked for reasons more or
less similar to those which made him like Harrison, the butcher. In
other words, he could not judge a work of literature as literature at
all. If it expressed sentiments with which he agreed, or called up
associations which were pleasant to him, good luck to it; if it
expressed sentiments with which he did not agree, and called up no
pleasant associations, bad luck.

In politics and religion this curious and very John Bullish unreason is
still more apparent. I suppose Borrow may be called, though he does not
call himself, a Tory. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery, and a
hater of Radicalism. He seems to have given up even the Corn Laws with a
certain amount of regret, and his general attitude is quite Eldonian.
But he combined with his general Toryism very curious Radicalisms of
detail, such as are to be found in Cobbett (who, as appeared at last,
and as all reasonable men should have always known, was really a Tory of
a peculiar type), and in several other English persons. The Church, the
Monarchy, and the Constitution generally were dear to Borrow, but he
hated all the aristocr