deeps, in all his brilliancies and in all his 'wallowings.' High or low, radiant or despondent, here is a poet anyhow. You love the style, or you do not; but, anyhow, here is a poet. A poet in English. Then comes what I think the best of all the Browns we have the Brown of the Manx things and the Yarns. Herein is vastly more than there is in most of the verse written of late about especial neighbourhoods, by rhymesters of all grades of talent and accomplishment, from the departed Laureate downwards. And the end is, simply:- Master his dialect, and read.' Master his dialect, such as it is, and become a worshipper of Brown. After all, his Tom Baynes is infinitely more "literary" than most of our Laureates have been, and has, besides, a very great deal to say that few indeed among our Laureates have had the wit to conceive; seeing that Tom Baynes is the most of what was written on the heart of T. E. B. Yes: that is so. And no better man, I think, has lived, and not many that were stronger or more helpful to his kind.

OLD ENGLAND

Is there in all literature a romance of the road so intimate and so inevitable-quite!—as Lavengro? I do not think there is. Or if such an one there be, it has yet to come into my ken. Not even the Lucius of The Golden Ass has a more plausible occasion; not even Don Quixote a more specious and a more searching incitement. Yet the good Alonso Quixada indoors were merely a provincial humorist with a distempered brain and an inordinate appetite for a certain type of fiction; while Lucius off the road would have eaten roses instantly, and so would have been healed of his translation, and come down to us as the hero of a feeble and futile tale of witchcraft. Yes, all that is true; and may be that I began by pitching my note too high. You see, I was thinking, not of these archetypes, not of these inevitables, so much as of Gil Blas, and Roderick Random, and the adventures of Guzman d'Alfarache, and that dull and deplorable English Rogue, that Meriton Latroon of whose author Borrow is dullard enough to remark that he was a man of singular (or surprising) genius. So was I led astray! Even so, however, and allowing for enthusiasm, it seems to me that I am very near the

it

truth when I claim for Lavengro a place, so far as mere inevitableness goes, with Don Quixote and The Golden Ass. As thus. The Scholar is born into a marching regiment, and so is a wanderer in his cradle. Starting from East Dereham, he sees all manner of places before he settles down at Norwich; and if he coach thence to London, and have remarkable adventures there with publishers and Armenians and antient apple-women, you feel all the while that these things are naught, for that Mr. Petulengro is behind these things, and with him the King's Highway; so that presently Londonneither understood nor realised, neither seen nor suggested-will pass like the unsubstantial pageant that it is, and in its place you will find the open road, and the wind on the heath, brother,' and the 'poor person's child,' and Peter Williams, Blazing Bosville, and Isopel Berners, and the red-haired priest, and all the rest of that homespun pageant which we know. Borrow calls it a dream,' and thus no doubt it is rightly described: being, in fact, a dream of the writer's own adventures, not exactly as they happened and as he appeared in them, but as he would have liked to believe that they happened, and thus, and not otherwise, did other people see him. A pleasing ambition? No doubt. But an innocent and humane one, surely? And, no doubt, not much unlike the reality. Or, at any rate, not nearly so much unlike the reality as you might observe, if you pushed home, in the cases of other writing men.1 Be this as it may, his 'dream' was essen

1 Thackeray, for instance, is said to have painted himself in Colonel Esmond. Now I am told that Borrow once inter

tially one of the open road, and to ignore or to misapprehend the circumstances and the fancies with which it is inwrought were to make sheer nonsense of it.

'Tis the most English of English books withal : even as the Scholar, for all his excursions into philology, is the most English of English men. Beef, beer, horses, Moll Flanders and the Church of England, the King and The Newgate Calendar,what is there, what could there be more typically English than all these? Peter Williams, too, the follower of Wesley-Peter Williams, with Mr. Petulengro and his crew, and the old apple-woman, and Blazing Bosville, and the Postilion who was once in Italy, and the Scholar's father with his memories of Ben Brain: all these, like the landscape and the joy in highway and dell and by-way, in the wayside tavern and the near gypsy camp, like Thurtell and The Life and Adventures of Joseph Sell, are purely English, alike in conception and association and effect. And that rhapsody on the heroes of the ropes and stakes, with its special eulogy of Tom Spring: Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at Flodden,' and all the rest of it, even to the 'bold chorus,' 'Here's a health to old honest John Bull,' in which it culminates: where shall you find more English and more valiant pellated Thackeray in society as 'the most offensive snob I have ever seen, Sir,'-or words to that effect. The distance between the several points of view is obvious; yet Thackeray may not have been utterly and hopelessly far-wandered in his presentation of himself as the sentimental Colonel. Even as Borrow may have been worse guided than I think he was when he sketched himself as the Scholar.

stuff? And 'twas ever the same with him. Read him, for instance, on the brother who wanted to go to Rome to study painting. "What,' says he, his cup of ale gripped mightily in his good right fist, his eye in a fine pugilistic frenzy rolling- What hast thou to do with old Rome, and thou an Englishman? Did thy blood never glow at the mention of thy native land? As an artist merely? Yes, I trow, and with reason, for thy native land need not grudge old Rome her "pictures of the world"; she has pictures of her own, "pictures of England"; and is it a new thing to toss up caps and shoutEngland against the world? Yes, against the world in all, in all: in science and in arms, in minstrel strain, and not less in the art "which enables the hand to deceive the intoxicated soul by means of pictures." Seek'st models? To Gainsborough and Hogarth turn, not names for the world, maybe, but English names and England against the world! That is explicit, is it not? Explicit, and likewise forcible! You feel as you read that about this Englishman there is no manner of nonsenseno nonsense at all! And that if he were yet living, and any were ill-advised enough to hold a pro-Boer meeting in his neighbourhood, there would certainly be bloody noses and cracked crowns, and these of his achievement, in the hall that night! That he could rail to excellent purpose is shown in the inimitable Appendices to The Romany Rye; but I deem it scarce possible that, with a Little-Englander in hand, he'd have confined his treatment of the wretch to pen-and-ink. Given the occasion and the incitement, he would assuredly have found other