he really first set
eyes upon her in the dingle whither she came with the Flaming Tinman,
whose look Lavengro did not like at all? Reality and romance, though
Borrow made them wear double harness, are not meant to be driven
together. It is hard to weep aright over Isopel Berners. The reader is
tortured by a sense of duty towards her. This distraction prevents our
giving ourselves away to Borrow. Perhaps after all he did meet the tall
girl in the dingle, in which case he was a fool for all his pains, losing
a gift the gods could not restore.

Quite apart from this particular doubt, the reader of Borrow feels that
good luck, happy chance, plays a larger part in the charm of the
composition than is quite befitting were Borrow to be reckoned an artist.
But nobody surely will quarrel with this ingredient. It can turn no
stomach. Happy are the lucky writers! Write as they will, they are
almost certain to please. There is such a thing as 'sweet
unreasonableness.'

But no sooner is this said than the necessity for instant and substantial
qualification becomes urgent, for though Borrow's personal vanity would
have been wounded had he been ranked with the literary gentlemen who do
business in words, his anger would have been justly aroused had he been
told he did not know how to write. He did know how to write, and he
acquired the art in the usual way, by taking pains. He might with
advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but
take pains he did. In all his books he aims at producing a certain
impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that
impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his
out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into
wantonness and seldom into gross improbability. He studied effects, as
his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly
demonstrate. He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know,
have had a theory of cadences. For words he had no great feeling except
as a philologist, and is capable of strange abominations. 'Individual'
pursues one through all his pages, where too are 'equine species,' 'finny
tribe'; but finding them where we do even these vile phrases, and others
nearly as bad, have a certain humour.

This chance remark brings me to the real point. Borrow's charm is that
he has behind his books a character of his own, which belongs to his
books as much as t