far
advanced, and when he was writing had been fulfilled. And now most
people have to keep off the grass, except in remotest parts or in the
neighbourhood of large towns where landowners are, to some extent, kept
in their place. The rivers, the very roads, are not ours, as they were
Borrow's. We go out to look for them still, and of those who adventure
with caravan, tent, or knapsack, the majority must be consciously under
Borrow's influence.

Yet he was no mere lover and praiser of old times. His London in 1825 is
more romantic than the later London of more deliberate romances: he found
it romantic; he did not merely think it would be so if only we could see
it. He loved the old and the wild too well to deface his feeling by more
than an occasional comparison with the new and the refined, and these
comparisons are not effective.

He is best when he is without apparent design. As a rule if he has a
design it is too obvious: he exaggerates, uses the old-fashioned trick of
re-appearance and recognition, or breaks out into heavy eloquence of
description or meditation. These things show up because he is the most
"natural" of writers. His style is a modification of the style of his
age, and is without the consistent personal quality of other vigorous
men's, like Hazlitt or Cobbett. Perhaps English became a foreign
language like his other thirty. Thus his books have no professional air,
and they create without difficulty the illusion of reality. This lack of
a literary manner, this appearance of writing like everybody else in his
day, combines, with his character and habits, to endear him to a
generation that has had its Pater and may find Stevenson too silky.

More than most authors Borrow appears greater than his books, though he
is their offspring. It is one of his great achievements to have made his
books bring forth this lusty and mysterious figure which moves to and fro
in all of them, worthy of the finest scenes and making the duller ones
acceptable. He is not greater than his books in the sense that he is
greater than the sum of them: as a writer he made the most out of his
life. But in the flesh he was a fine figure of a man, and what he wrote
has added something, swelling him to more than human proportions,
stranger and more heroical. So we come to admire him as a rare specimen
of the _genus homo_, who had among other faculties that of writing
English; and at last we have him armed with a pen that i