great part of his charm lies. It is, as has been fully
acknowledged, a one-sided, wrong-headed, not always quite right-hearted
personality. But it is intensely English, possessing at the same time a
certain strain of romance which the other John Bulls of literature
mostly lack, and which John Bunyan, the king of them all, only reached
within the limits, still more limited than Borrow's, of purely
religious, if not purely ecclesiastical, interests. A born grumbler; a
person with an intense appetite for the good things of this life;
profoundly impressed with, and at the same time sceptically critical of,
the bad or good things of another life; apt, as he somewhere says
himself, "to hit people when he is not pleased"; illogical; constantly
right in general, despite his extremely roundabout ways of reaching his
conclusion; sometimes absurd, and yet full of humour; alternately
prosaic and capable of the highest poetry; George Borrow, Cornishman on
the father's side and Huguenot on the mother's, managed to display in
perfection most of the characteristics of what once was, and let us hope
has not quite ceased to be, the English type. If he had a slight
overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic peculiarity, it was more than made
up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any
one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been in
Englishmen, there was something perhaps more as well as something less
than English in his fashion of expression.

To conclude, Borrow has--what after all is the chief mark of a great
writer--distinction. "Try to be like somebody," said the unlucky
critic-bookseller to Lamartine; and he has been gibbeted for it, very
justly, for the best part of a century. It must be admitted that "try
not to be like other people," though a much more fashionable, is likely
to be quite as disastrous a recommendation. But the great writers,
whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and
sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being
themselves, and that is what Borrow does. His attraction is rather
complex, and different parts of it may, and no doubt do, apply with
differing force to this and that reader. One may be fascinated by his
pictures of an unconventional and open-air life, the very possibilities
of which are to a great extent lost in our days, though patches of
ground here and there in England (notably the tracts of open ground
between Cromer