. It may be taken as positively certain that Borrow never was "in
love," as the phrase is, and that he had hardly the remotest conception
of what being in love means. It is possible that he was a most cleanly
liver--it is possible that he was quite the reverse: I have not the
slightest information either way. But that he never in all his life
heard with understanding the refrain of the "Pervigilium,"

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet,

I take as certain.

The foregoing remarks have, I think, summed up all Borrow's defects, and
it will be observed that even these defects have for the most part the
attraction of a certain strangeness and oddity. If they had not been
accompanied by great and peculiar merits, he would not have emerged from
the category of the merely bizarre, where he might have been left
without further attention. But, as a matter of fact, all, or almost all,
of his defects are not only counterbalanced by merits, but are
themselves, in a great degree, exaggerations or perversions of what is
intrinsically meritorious. With less wilfulness, with more attention to
the literature, the events, the personages of his own time, with a more
critical and common-sense attitude towards his own crotchets, Borrow
could hardly have wrought out for himself (as he has to an extent hardly
paralleled by any other prose writer who has not deliberately chosen
supernatural or fantastic themes) the region of fantasy, neither too
real nor too historical, which Joubert thought proper to the poet.
Strong and vivid as Borrow's drawing of places and persons is, he always
contrives to throw in touches which somehow give the whole the air of
being rather a vision than a fact. Never was such a John-a-Dreams as
this solid, pugilistic John Bull. Part of this literary effect of his is
due to his quaint habit of avoiding, where he can, the mention of proper
names. The description, for instance, of Old Sarum and Salisbury itself
in _Lavengro_ is sufficient to identify them to the most careless
reader, even if the name of Stonehenge had not occurred on the page
before; but they are not named. The description of Bettws-y-Coed in
_Wild Wales_, though less poetical, is equally vivid. Yet here it would
be quite possible for a reader, who did not know the place and its
relation to other named places, to pass without any idea of the actual
spot. It is the same with his frequent references to his beloved city of
Norwich, an