he Pope,"
are so literally true. It was not in Borrow's case a case of _sancta
simplicitas_. He has at times flashes of by no means orthodox sentiment,
and seems to have fought, and perhaps hardly won, many a battle against
the army of the doubters. But when it comes to the Pope, he is as
single-minded an enthusiast as John Bunyan himself, whom, by the way,
he resembles in more than one point. The attitude was, of course, common
enough among his contemporaries; indeed any man who has reached middle
life must remember numerous examples among his own friends and kindred.
But in literature, and such literature as Borrow's, it is rare.

Yet again, the curiously piecemeal, and the curiously arbitrary
character of Borrow's literary studies in languages other than his own,
is noteworthy in so great a linguist. The entire range of French
literature, old as well as new, he seems to have ignored altogether--I
should imagine out of pure John Bullishness. He has very few references
to German, though he was a good German scholar--a fact which I account
for by the other fact, that in his earlier literary period German was
fashionable, and that he never would have anything to do with anything
that fashion favoured. Italian, though he certainly knew it well, is
equally slighted. His education, if not his taste for languages, must
have made him a tolerable (he never could have been an exact) classical
scholar. But it is clear that insolent Greece and haughty Rome possessed
no attraction for him. I question whether even Spanish would not have
been too common a toy to attract him much, if it had not been for the
accidental circumstances which connected him with Spain.

Lastly (for I love to get my devil's advocate work over), in Borrow's
varied and strangely attractive gallery of portraits and characters,
most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have
sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and
the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a
mere wayward piece of irony--a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am
afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with
Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even
the more wonderful, though much less interesting, dialogue with the
Irish girl in the last chapters of _Wild Wales_ might be so rendered by
a hardy exegete. But the negative evidence in all the books is too
strong