and Wells in Borrow's own county) still recall them. To
others he may be attractive for his sturdy patriotism, or his
adventurous and wayward spirit, or his glimpses of superstition and
romance. The racy downrightness of his talk; the axioms, such as that to
the Welsh alewife, "The goodness of ale depends less upon who brews it
than upon what it is brewed of"; or the sarcastic touches as that of the
dapper shopkeeper, who, regarding the funeral of Byron, observed, "I,
too, am frequently unhappy," may each and all have their votaries. His
literary devotion to literature would, perhaps, of itself attract few;
for, as has been hinted, it partook very much of the character of
will-worship, and there are few people who like any will-worship in
letters except their own; but it adds to his general attraction, no
doubt, in the case of many. That neither it, nor any other of his
claims, has yet forced itself as it should on the general public is an
undoubted fact; a fact not difficult to understand, though rather
difficult fully to explain, at least without some air of superior
knowingness and taste. Yet he has, as has been said, his devotees, and I
think they are likely rather to increase than to decrease. He wants
editing, for his allusive fashion of writing probably makes a great part
of him nearly unintelligible to those who have not from their youth up
devoted themselves to the acquisition of useless knowledge. There ought
to be a good life of him. The great mass of his translations, published
and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt
deserve judicious excerption. If professed philologers were not even
more ready than most other specialists each to excommunicate all the
others except himself and his own particular Johnny Dods of Farthing's
Acre, it would be rather interesting to hear what some modern men of
many languages have to say to Borrow's linguistic achievements. But all
these things are only desirable embellishments and assistances. His real
claims and his real attractions are comprised in four small volumes, the
purchase of which, under modern arrangements of booksellers, leaves some
change out of a sovereign, and which will about half fill the ordinary
bag used for briefs and dynamite. It is not a large literary baggage,
and it does not attempt any very varied literary kinds. If not exactly a
novelist in any one of his books, Borrow is a romancer, in the true and
not the ironic sense of