and
the England of coaches; in fact he hated the bullying coachmen so that he
expressed nothing but gladness when they had disappeared from the road.
No: it was first as the England of the successful wars with Napoleon, and
second as the England of his youth that he idealised it--the country of
Byron and Farmer George, not that of Tennyson, Victoria and Albert; for
as Byron was one of the new age and yet looked back to Pope and down on
Wordsworth, so did Borrow look back.

His English geography is far vaguer than his Spanish. He creeps--walking
or riding--over this land with more mystery. The variety and
difficulties of the roads were less, and actual movement fills very few
pages. He advances not so much step by step as adventure by adventure.
Well might he say, a little impudently, "there is not a chapter in the
present book which is not full of adventures, with the exception of the
present one, and this is not yet terminated"--it ends with a fall from
his horse which stuns him. There is an air of somnambulism about some of
the travel, especially when he is escaping alone from London and hack-
writing. He shows great art in his transitions from day to day, from
scene to scene, making it natural that one hour of one day should have
the importance of the whole of another year, and one house more than the
importance of several day's journeys. It matters not that he crammed
more than was possible between Greenwich and Horncastle fairs, probably
by transplanting earlier or later events. Time and space submit to him:
his old schoolfellows were vainly astonished that he gave no chapters to
them and his years at Norwich Grammar School. Thus England seems a great
and a strange land on Borrow's page, though he does not touch the sea or
the mountains, or any celebrated places except Stonehenge. His England
is strange, I think, because it is presented according to a purely
spiritual geography in which the childish drawling of "Witney on the
Windrush manufactures blankets," etc., is utterly forgot. Few men have
the courage or the power to be honestly impressionistic and to say what
they feel instead of compromising between that and what they believe to
be "the facts."

It is also strange on account of the many adventures which it provides,
and these will always attract attention, because England in 1911 is not
what it was in 1825, but still more because few men, especially writing
men, ever take their chance upon the ro