even though these five and twenty be spent in
penury and contempt, and the rest in the possession of wealth, honour,
respectability, ay, and many of them in strength and health. . . ." Still
more emphatically did he think the same when he was looking on his past
life in the dingle, feeling his arms and thighs and teeth, which were
strong and sound; "so now was the time to labour, to marry, to eat strong
flesh, and beget strong children--the power of doing all this would pass
away with youth, which was terribly transitory."

{picture: View on Mousehold Heath, near Norwich. (From the painting by
"Old Crome" in The National Gallery.) Photo: W. J. Roberts: page227.jpg}

Youth and strength or their extreme opposites alone attracted him, and
therefore he is best in writing of men, if we except the tall Brynhild,
Isopel, and the old witch, Mrs. Herne, than whom "no she bear of Lapland
ever looked more fierce and hairy." In the same breath as he praises
youth he praises England, pouring scorn on those who traverse Spain and
Portugal in quest of adventures, "whereas there are ten times more
adventures to be met with in England than in Spain, Portugal, or stupid
Germany to boot." It was the old England before railways, though Mr.
Petulengro heard a man speaking of a wonderful invention that "would set
aside all the old roads, which in a little time would be ploughed up, and
sowed with corn, and cause all England to be laid down with iron roads,
on which people would go thundering along in vehicles, pushed forward by
fire and smoke." Borrow makes another of his characters also foretell
the triumph of railways, and I insist on quoting part of the sentence as
another example of Borrow's mysterious way: the speaker has had his
information from the projector of the scheme: "which he has told me many
of the wisest heads of England have been dreaming of during a period of
six hundred years, and which it seems was alluded to by a certain Brazen
Head in the story-book of Friar Bacon, who is generally supposed to have
been a wizard, but in reality was a great philosopher. Young man, in
less than twenty years, by which time I shall be dead and gone, England
will be surrounded with roads of metal, on which armies may travel with
mighty velocity, and of which the walls of brass and iron by which the
friar proposed to defend his native land are types." And yet he makes
little of the practical difference between the England of railways