d his less frequent references to his later home at Oulton. A
paraphrase, an innuendo, a word to the wise he delights in, but anything
perfectly clear and precise he abhors. And by this means and others,
which it might be tedious to trace out too closely, he succeeds in
throwing the same cloudy vagueness over times as well as places and
persons. A famous passage--perhaps the best known, and not far from the
best he ever wrote--about Byron's funeral, fixes, of course, the date of
the wondrous facts or fictions recorded in _Lavengro_ to a nicety. Yet
who, as he reads it and its sequel (for the separation of _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_ is merely arbitrary, though the second book is, as a
whole, less interesting than the former), ever thinks of what was
actually going on in the very positive and prosaic England of 1824-25?
The later chapters of _Lavengro_ are the only modern _Roman d'Aventures_
that I know. The hero goes "overthwart and endlong," just like the
figures whom all readers know in Malory, and some in his originals. I do
not know that it would be more surprising if Borrow had found Sir Ozana
dying at the chapel in Lyonesse, or had seen the full function of the
Grail, though I fear he would have protested against that as popish.
Without any apparent art, certainly without the elaborate apparatus
which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in
using, Borrow spirits his readers at once away from mere reality. If his
events are frequently as odd as a dream, they are always as perfectly
commonplace and real for the moment as the events of a dream are--a
little fact which the above-mentioned tellers of the above-mentioned
fantastic stories are too apt to forget. It is in this natural romantic
gift that Borrow's greatest charm lies. But it is accompanied and nearly
equalled, both in quality and in degree, by a faculty for dialogue.
Except Defoe and Dumas, I cannot think of any novelists who contrive to
tell a story in dialogue and to keep up the ball of conversation so well
as Borrow; while he is considerably the superior of both in pure style
and in the literary quality of his talk. Borrow's humour, though it is
of the general class of the older English--that is to say, the
pre-Addisonian--humorists, is a species quite by itself. It is rather
narrow in range, a little garrulous, busied very often about curiously
small matters, but wonderfully observant and true, and possessing a
quaint dry savo