confine himself to the mysterious sublime. He tells us, for
example, that Mendizabal, the Prime Minister, was a huge athletic man,
"somewhat taller than myself, who measure six-feet-two without my shoes."
Several times he was mistaken for a Jew, and once for a Rabbi, by the
Jews themselves. Add to this the expression that he put on for the
benefit of the farrier at Betanzos: he was stooping to close the vein
that had been opened in the leg of his horse, and he "looked up into the
farrier's face, arching his eyebrows. '_Carracho_! what an evil wizard!'
muttered the farrier, as he walked away."

{picture: Mendizabal, The Spanish Minister: page194.jpg}

In the wilds he grew a beard--he had one at Jaraicejo--and it is perhaps
worth noticing this, to rebut the opinion that he could not grow a beard,
and that he was therefore as other men are with the same disability. He
speaks more than once of his shedding tears, and at Lisbon he kissed the
stone above Fielding's grave. But these are little things of little
importance in the landscape portrait which emerges from the whole of the
book, of the grave adventurer, all but always equal in his boldness and
his discretion, the lord of those wild ways and wild men, who "rides in
the whirlwind and directs the storm" all over Spain.

In brief, he is the very hero that a wondering and waiting audience would
be satisfied to see appearing upon such a stage. Except Dante on his
background of Heaven and Hell, and Byron on his background of Europe and
Time, no writer had in one book placed himself with greater distinction
before the world. His glory was threefold. He was the man who was a
Gypsy in politics, because he had lived with Gypsies so long. He was the
man who said to the Spanish Prime Minister: "It is a pleasant thing to be
persecuted for the Gospel's sake." He was the man of whom it was said
_by an enemy_, after the affair of Benedict Mol, that _Don Jorge_ was at
the bottom of half the knavish farces in Spain.

Very little of Borrow's effectiveness can seriously be attributed to this
or that quality of style, for it will all amount to saying that he had an
effective style. But it may be permissible to point out that it is also
a style that is unnoticeable except for what it effects. It runs at
times to rotten Victorianism, both heavy and vague, as when he calls _El
Greco_ or Domenico "a most extraordinary genius, some of whose
productions possess merit of a very hig