that of a heroine, a queenly heroine,--that of Theresa
of Hungary, for example; or, better still, that of Brynhilda the
Valkyrie, the beloved of Sigurd, the serpent-killer, who incurred the
curse of Odin, because, in the tumult of spears, she sided with the young
king, and doomed the old warrior to die, to whom Odin had promised
victory.

"Belle looked at me for a moment in silence; then turning to Mrs.
Petulengro, she said, 'You have had your will with me; are you
satisfied?' 'Quite so, madam,' said Mrs. Petulengro, 'and I hope you
will be so too, as soon as you have looked in the glass.' 'I have looked
in one already,' said Belle,' and the glass does not flatter.' . . ."

Here it is easy to notice how the uncolloquial and even ugly English does
not destroy the illusion of the scene, but entirely subserves it and
makes these two or three pages fine painter's work for richness and still
drama.

I have not forgotten the Man in Black, though I gladly would. Not that I
am any more in sympathy with his theology than Borrow's, if it is more
interesting and venerable. But in this priest, Borrow's method, always
instinctively intense if not exaggerated, falls to caricature. I have no
objection to caricature; when it is of a logical or incidental kind I
enjoy it, even in "The Romany Rye"; I enjoy, for example, the snoring
Wordsworthian, without any prejudice against Wordsworth. "The Catholic
Times" as late as 1900 was still angry with Borrow's "crass anti-Catholic
bigotry." I should have expected them to laugh consumedly at a priest, a
parson and a publican who deserve places in the same gallery with wicked
earls and noble savages of popular fiction. It may be true that this
"creation of Borrow's most studied hatred" is, as Mr. Seccombe says,
{242} "a triumph of complex characterisation." He is "a joyous liver and
an unscrupulous libertine, sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a
German professor, as practical as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he
has as many ways of converting the folks among whom he is thrown as
Panurge had of eating the corn in ear. For the simple and
credulous--crosses and beads; for the hard-hearted and venal--material
considerations; for the cultured and educated--a fine tissue of epigrams
and anthropology; for the ladies--flattery and badinage. A spiritual
ancestor of Anatole France's marvellous full-length figure of Jerome
Coignard, Borrow's conception takes us back first to Rabelais