insula at a singularly interesting
time, the disturbed years of the early reign of Isabel Segunda. Navarre
and Aragon, with Catalonia, Valencia, and Murcia, he seems to have left
entirely unvisited; I suppose because of the Carlists. Nor did he
attempt the southern part of Portugal; but Castile and Leon, with the
north of Portugal and the south of Spain, he quartered in the most
interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant and his
saddle-bag of Testaments at, I should suppose, a considerable cost to
the subscribers of the Society and at, it may be hoped, some gain to the
propagation of evangelical principles in the Peninsula, but certainly
with the results of extreme satisfaction to himself and of a very
delightful addition to English literature. He was actually imprisoned at
Madrid, and was frequently in danger from Carlists, and brigands, and
severely orthodox ecclesiastics. It is possible to imagine a more
ideally perfect missionary; but it is hardly possible to imagine a more
ideally perfect traveller. His early habits of roughing it, his gipsy
initiation, his faculties as a linguist, and his other faculties as a
born vagrant, certain to fall on his feet anywhere, were all called into
operation. But he might have had all these advantages and yet lacked the
extraordinary literary talent which the book reveals. In the first
chapter there is a certain stiffness; but the passage of the Tagus in
the second must have told every competent reader in 1842 that he had to
deal with somebody quite different from the run of common writers, and
thenceforward the book never flags till the end. How far the story is
rigidly historical I should be very sorry to have to decide. The author
makes a kind of apology in his preface for the amount of fact which has
been supplied from memory. I daresay the memory was quite trustworthy,
and certainly adventures are to the adventurous. We have had daring
travellers enough during the last half-century, but I do not know that
any one has ever had quite such a romantic experience as Borrow's ride
across the Hispano-Portuguese frontier with a gipsy _contrabandista_,
who was at the time a very particular object of police inquiry. I
daresay the interests of the Bible Society required the adventurous
journey to the wilds of Finisterra. But I feel that if that association
had been a mere mundane company and Borrow its agent, troublesome
shareholders might have asked awkward questions at the an