acy (except those whom he knew personally) and
most of the gentry. Also, he had the odd Radical sympathy for anybody
who, as the vernacular has it, was "kept out of his rights." I do not
know, but I should think, that Borrow was a strong Tichbornite. In that
curious book _Wild Wales_, where almost more of his real character
appears than in any other, he has to do with the Crimean War. It was
going on during the whole time of his tour, and he once or twice reports
conversations in which, from his knowledge of Russia, he demonstrated
beforehand to Welsh inquirers how improbable, not to say impossible, it
was that the Russian should be beaten. But the thing that seems really
to have interested him most was the case of Lieutenant P---- or
Lieutenant Parry, whom he sometimes refers to in the fuller and
sometimes in the less explicit manner. My own memories of 1854 are
rather indistinct, and I confess that I have not taken the trouble to
look up this celebrated case. As far as I can remember, and as far as
Borrow's references here and elsewhere go, it was the doubtless
lamentable but not uncommon case of a man who is difficult to live with,
and who has to live with others. Such cases occur at intervals in every
mess, college, and other similar aggregation of humanity. The person
difficult to live with gets, to use an Oxford phrase, "drawn." If he is
reformable he takes the lesson, and very likely becomes excellent
friends with those who "drew" him. If he is not, he loses his temper,
and evil results of one kind or another follow. Borrow's Lieutenant
P---- seems unluckily to have been of the latter kind, and was, if I
mistake not, recommended by the authorities to withdraw from a situation
which, to him, was evidently a false and unsuitable one. With this
Borrow could not away. He gravely chronicles the fact of his reading an
"excellent article in a local paper on the case of Lieutenant P----";
and with no less gravity (though he was, in a certain way, one of the
first humorists of our day) he suggests that the complaints of the
martyred P---- to the Almighty were probably not unconnected with our
Crimean disasters. This curious parochialism pursues him into more
purely religious matters. I do not know any other really great man of
letters of the last three-quarters of a century of whose attitude
Carlyle's famous words, "regarding God's universe as a larger patrimony
of Saint Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt t