al humour blent with pathos in his picture of this
ill-rewarded old disciplinarian (who combined a tenderness of heart with
a fondness for military metaphor that frequently reminds one of 'My Uncle
Toby'), the details of the ailments and the portents that attended his
infantile career, and, above all, the glimpses of the wandering military
life from barrack to barrack and from garrison to garrison, inevitably
remind the reader of the childish reminiscences of Laurence Sterne, a
writer to whom it may thus early be said that George Borrow paid no small
amount of unconscious homage."

The same critic has remarked on "the Sterne-like conclusion of a chapter:
'Italy--what was I going to say about Italy?'" It was perhaps Sterne who
taught him the use of the dash when no more words are necessary or ready
to meet the case, and also when no more are permissible by contemporary
taste. The passage where Ardry and his French mistress talk to Borrow,
she using her own language, is like "The Sentimental Journey." And, as
Mr. Seccombe has suggested, Borrow found in Sterne's a precedent for the
rate of progress in his autobiography.

But innumerable are the possible styles which combine something from the
Bible, Defoe, and Sterne, with something else upon a Victorian
foundation. Borrow's something else, which dominates and welds the rest,
is the most important. It expresses the man, or rather it allows the
man's qualities to appear, his melancholy, his independence, his
curiosity, his love of strong men and horses. Of little felicities there
are very few. It has gusto always at command, and mystery also. We feel
in it a kind of reality not often associated with professional
literature, but rather with the letters of men who are not writers and
with the speech of illiterate men of character. The great difference
between them and Borrow is that their speech can rarely be represented in
print except by another genius, and that their letters only now and then
reach the level which Borrow continues at and often rises above. Yet he
has something in common with such men--for example, in his feeling for
Nature. In Spain, it is true, he gave way to declamatory descriptions of
grandeur and desolation: in England, where he saw nothing of the kind, he
wrote little description, and the impression of the country through which
he is passing is that of an inarticulate outdoor man, strong and sincere
but vague. Here, again, he has something