ever deeply he treasured the "liberty" to do as he pleased and the "humanity" of embarrassing the soldiers and sailors of England in the execution of their duty, he held the safety and prosperity of his native country at a very cheap rate. That Pitt was unable to carry out his intention of sending Fox to the Tower we may regret. It is satisfactory to remember that Fox's name was justly and rightly struck from the list of Privy Councillors. And thus we are brought to Sir George's complaint that Fox has been judged by a false interpretation of "his attitude with regard to the foreign policy of Great Britain." There seems no legitimate ground of complaint. To speak of Fox and the foreign policy of Great Britain in the same sentence is to cause a wanton confusion. England's foreign policy was the home policy of Fox. In other words, wherever England found a foe, Fox found friend. For thirty years Fox used such language towards his own country as would very properly have brought a soldier to the gallows. A shameless and consistent traitor, he spoke and worked against his native land and its Government with all the force and energy that he possessed. But, says Sir George, "Fox had a policy, while his opponents had none." His opponents had a sound policy, which they failed to carry out. Fox's policy was the simple and easy policy of surrender. He was ready to give anything away which belonged to England and for which Englishmen had fought. If he could, he would have come to terms with the Americans when these terms included the cession of Canada to the revolting colonies. In brief, his one ambition, then and always, was to bring comfort to the King's enemies. He pursued the same policy when he despatched Adair to Russia as his private emissary. He pursued the same policy when he did his best to support the French, who were at war with Great Britain, by fomenting sedition at home. The tidings of a British victory filled him with despair. When Howe triumphed at Brooklyn he loudly deplored "the terrible news." The defeat at Valmy stirred his soul to enthusiasm. "No public event," said he, "not excepting Yorktown and Saratoga, ever happened that gave me so much delight. could not allow myself to believe it for some days for fear of disappointment." His ardour for his country's foes grew more violent with the years, as he confessed himself. "To tell the truth," he wrote in 1801, "I am gone something further in hate to the English Government than perhaps you and my friends are, and certainly further than can prudently be avowed. The triumph of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise.” In the face of such pronounce I ments as these, it would be wiser, perhaps, not to mention Charles Fox and the foreign policy of Great Britain in the same sentence. Such was the man by whose exhortations, says Sir George Trevelyan, "not a few members of Parliament were brought to a consciousness of their responsibilities." What responsibilities, we wonder? To insult the King, whom they were pledged to serve, and to perplex the country to whose government they aspired? If these were the responsibilities of which they desired the consciousness, they could not have found a better guide than Fox, even though they might not sympathise with his grosser enthusiasms. There remains the puzzle of the man and his worshippers. Why should Fox have been influenced by a mad craving to administer the affairs of a nation for whom hourly he prayed defeat? He could advance the cause which he had at heart, the cause of the enemy, with a far greater hope of success if he remained in opposition. It is impossible to estimate the aid which his speeches rendered to the Americans, or to measure the embarrassment in which he involved William Pitt during the French War. Had he been Secretary of State, those mischiefs would have been beyond his reach. Nevertheless, all his hopes were centred in office. "As a party man," said he, "I think it a good thing for my party to come into office, were it only for a month." His perpetual disappointments increased his acridity, and when at last he took office, after Pitt's death, good and evil were both beyond his reach. The worship which was offered him in his lifetime, and which still ascends, like incense, from the altars of the Whigs, was due in the first instance to his personal gifts. He was that most dangerous of all things known to the modern state, an orator without principle. His eloquence imposed his sophistries upon the House of Commons, where he delighted to prove the worse the better cause. At Brooks's and among his friends he was irresistible, and they were prudent who, having any cause of dissension with him, shunned his society. The memoirs of the time are packed with evidence of his unfailing urbanity and agreeable manners, of his astounding energy at Newmarket and the Pharo table, of his imperturbable good - humour under the stress of bad luck. these are excellent qualities, no doubt. They are not the qualities which necessarily make a statesman, nor the qualities, we should have thought, which would attach the wholehearted devotion of Nonconformity. Fortunately, it is impossible that such a book as Sir George Trevelyan's should ever be written again. The Whigs no longer rule rule unchallenged in the province of history. And we hail their discomfiture with the keenest satisfaction. At last many a flagrant injustice will be ex All posed. At last a fair understanding will be possible, if it be desired, between England and the United States. So long as we represented ourselves as base and dishonourable in all our dealings with the Americans, a genuine friendship was impossible. You do not make friendships with selfconfessed scoundrels. But we are now learning the lesson, taught us also by the Americans themselves, that the rhetoric used by Fox and Burke against their own countrymen had not the slightest warrant in fact. "Right or wrong, the loyalists were sincerely patriotic too," writes an American, "and willing, when the crucial moment came, to sacrifice fortune and home to the principles which they held as devoutly as ever revolutionist held his. What is more, as one considers to-day the arguments of the loyalists, it is hard to feel them legally weaker than those which finally prevailed." Thus writes an American historian, and had Sir George Trevelyan been able to look upon history with like impartial eyes he might have achieved something more valuable than an undeserved attack upon his own land and the obsequious worship of a false hero. The truth is, the heroworshipper is very often the worst possible biographer. biographer. Boswell is the great exception, but he is an exception to all the rules. A far better picture of Charles Fox is to be found in the letters of George Selwyn than in the neat moralisings of Sir George Trevelyan. It is idle to make a china ornament of a man, whether he be good or bad. George Borrow, for instance, has suffered more than most from the general misunderstanding. Some years ago an overzealous American, Dr Knapp by name, set him up upon a pedestal and prostrated himself before him. He told us far too much and far too little of his hero-far too much, because he had no talent of selection; far too little, because he did not understand him. Then a set of strange creatures, who called themselves Borrovians, laid hands upon 'Lavengro,' and made it a sort of succursale to Omar Khayyam. There was a certain prudence in the conjunction, as Oulton and Woodbridge are both in the Eastern Counties, and may be visited by the pious pilgrim on the same excursion. But Borrow stands in no greater need than FitzGerald of esoteric admiration. His works there for all, who will, to read and understand. We want no more than a plain, straightforward biography to complete our knowledge, and this, we may say with confidence, Mr Herbert Jenkins has given us.1 Mr Jenkins writes clearly, simply, and impartially. His pages are free from cant or adulation. He understands the wayward, capricious man with whom he are 1 The Life of George Borrow. Compiled from unpublished Official Documents, his Works, Correspondence, &c., by Herbert Jenkins. London: John Murray. if not ridiculous. Yet, as Boccaccio set the greater store by his Latin treatises, so Borrow vaunts most highly his researches into a science of which he knew not the rudiments. And this lamentable lack of self-knowledge not merely tries the reader's patience has to deal, and makes no at- of gibberish which were dear tempt to represent him in other to him, he becomes tiresome, than in his true colours. The worst fault of the book is a lack of proportion. As we look back upon Borrow's career we recognise that the work which he did for the Bible Society in Spain and elsewhere was but an episode. But it is concerning this episode that the largest amount of material exists, and Mr Jenkins has yielded to the obvious temptation of devoting far more space to it, in consequence, than it demands or is worth. Nevertheless, he has earned our gratitude. He has avoided, on the one hand, the pitiful ineptitude of Dr Knapp, and, on the other, the absurd sentimentalities of the Borrovians. Mr Jenkins' sobriety and good sense have put us more deeply in his debt, because Borrow's own perversity obscured for many years the real merits of his books. It was his custom to claim for himself many qualities which he did not possess. It pleased him to masquerade as a "philologist," though in fact he did not know the meaning of the word. In his eyes 'Lavengro' was a philological treatise, and he was filled with fury against those who could not perceive a profound erudition in 'The Romany Rye.' The truth is that he was an incorrigible pedant. He could not carry lightly the knowledge, or the half knowledge, which had so laboriously acquired. When he lingers by the way to discourse of the many forms he it spoils many of Borrow's best effects. The opening of the jockey's story in 'The Romany Rye' is faultless. "My grandfather was a shorter," said the jockey, "and my father was a smasher; the one was scragg'd, and the other lagg'd." For narrative we want nothing better than that, and then Borrow sinks for a page and a half to the most solemn nonsense. Mr Barlow, in his heaviest manner, is a dancer compared with him. "How singular,” said I, "is the fall and debasement of words," and much more of the same kind, until he had almost brought the honest jockey down to the level of his own nerveless speech. If philological pedantry was the worst fault of which Borrow was guilty, the desire of preaching comes very near to it. He had many moral hobbies, and he rode them to death. He suspected all persons of gentility, and yet could be so genteel himself as to marvel that in the house of his Cornish relatives there were no fire-grates-those sad emblems of respectability, — but only open fireplaces. Again, wherever he went he suspected Jacobitism or Popery or the Radical heresy truly the worst heresy of all. No man who had in him the elements of greatness ever wrote so vain a piece of rubbish as the appendix of 'The Romany Rye.' In sense and form alike it would disgrace the debating society of a provincial town, and it would be a kindness to Borrow's reputation if it were ruthlessly excised from every future edition of the work. Nor was Borrow guilty of these faults by accident or by stealth. He gloried in his ineptitude. He fought so vigorously for his hobbies that it seems as though he wished his readers to esteem them as the real purpose of his books. But here, at any rate, his readers will follow the example which he set throughout his life and take their own way; and they will not miss their reward. When Borrow is under the open sky he is the master alike of men and words: he knows the loafers and footpads whom he meets by the hedgerow as few men have ever known them. 'Lavengro' and "The Romany Rye,' fragments both of an autobiography, are the best romance of the road that English letters may boast. The sight of a tramp or a gipsy kindled all the enthusiasm of Borrow's nature. And after a gipsy he best loved a horse. Even the pedant in him makes this admission. "With him," he confesses of himself, "the pursuit of languages was always modified by the love of horses." And in the incomparable scene at Horncastle Fair you may more surely discover the genuine Borrow than in the nonsense about Eschylus and the speech of Chikno. Borrow, in brief, could take a free breath only on the windy heath and in the open air. He was not a house-dweller by temperament; he asked no roof over his head; the dingles and commons of England were the home he loved best. Was it not upon the heath that the bruisers of old pitched their stakes? And has the prize-ring ever found a more valiant champion than the son of the man who had faced Big Ben in the Park? Not even Hazlitt has discoursed more gallantly of our English heroes, long dead and gone. "There they come, the bruisers, far from London,"-thus he writes in a lyrical passage, some one way, some another: some of tiptop reputation come with peers in their chariots; others come in their own gigs, driving their own bits of blood, and I heard one say: 'I have driven through at a heat the whole hundred and eleven miles, and only stopped to bait twice.'" strikes the true note, and is worthy, every word of it, of him who celebrated that "true piece of English stuff, Tom of Bedford, sharp as Winter, kind as Spring. That When Borrow forgets his pedantries and frees his mind of the journals, he writes an English at once pure and direct. He has the faculty, |