and mellow,
with scarcely any smack of the hop in it, and though so pale and delicate
to the eye nearly as strong as brandy." The Chester ale he spirted out
of the window after the Chester cheese. To his subjects of admiration he
also adds Robert Southey, as "not the least of Britain's four great
latter poets, decidedly her best prose writer, and probably the purest
and most noble character to which she has ever given birth"; but this was
when he was thinking of Madoc, the Welsh discoverer of America. I should
be sorry to have to name any of the other "four poets" except Byron.
Another literary _dictum_ is that Macpherson's "Ossian" is genuine
because a book which followed it and was undoubtedly genuine bore a
strong resemblance to it. An opinion that shows as fully as any single
one could Borrow's vivid and vague inaccuracy and perversity is this of
Snowdon:

"But it is from its connection with romance that Snowdon derives its
chief interest. Who when he thinks of Snowdon does not associate it with
the heroes of romance, Arthur and his knights? whose fictitious
adventures, the splendid dreams of Welsh and Breton minstrels, many of
the scenes of which are the valleys and passes of Snowdon, are the origin
of romance, before which what is classic has for more than half a century
been waning, and is perhaps eventually destined to disappear. Yes, to
romance Snowdon is indebted for its interest and consequently for its
celebrity; but for romance Snowdon would assuredly not be what it at
present is, one of the very celebrated hills of the world, and to the
poets of modern Europe almost what Parnassus was to those of old."

Who associates Snowdon with Arthur, and what Arthurian stories have the
valleys and passes of Snowdon for their scenes? what "poets of modern
Europe" have sung of it? And yet Borrow has probably often carried this
point with his reader.

Borrow as a Christian is very conspicuous in this book. He cannot speak
of Sir Henry Morgan without calling him "a scourge of God on the cruel
Spaniards of the New World. . . . On which account God prospered and
favoured him, permitting him to attain the noble age of ninety." He was
fond of discovering the hand of God, for example, in changing a
nunnery--"a place devoted to gorgeous idolatry and obscene lust"--into a
quiet old barn: "Surely," he asks, "the hand of God is visible here?" and
the respectful mower answers: "It is so, sir." In the same way, when he