e acquainted
with this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was
scarcely knowledge. He was not what one could fairly call unread in the
classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared himself
complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage. He had the
utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody else was
the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest abhorrence.
The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific in cases of
chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough sincerity of his
view than to any conscious subtlety of humour. He disliked Scott
especially for his easy tolerance of Jacobites and Papists, {25} while he
distrusted his portraits, those portraits of the rougher people which may
have frequently been over-praised by Scott's admirers. We most of us
love Scott, it is a fact, beyond the power of nice discrimination. As to
the verisimilitude of a portrait such as that of Meg Merrilies we must
allow Borrow to be a most competent critic, but we are at a loss to
sympathise with his failure to appreciate studies of such lifelike
fidelity as Edie Ochiltree and Andrew Fairservice, whose views anent "the
muckle hure that sitteth on seven hills, as if ane wasna braid eneugh for
her auld hinder end," had so much that was in sympathy with Borrow's own.

Of all such prejudices and peculiarities, no less than of his gifts,
Borrow was ridiculously proud. In certain respects he was as vainly,
querulously, and childishly assertive as Goldsmith himself; while in the
haughty self-isolation with which he eschewed the society of people with
endowments as great or even greater than his own, he was quite the
opposite of "poor Goldy." If the latter had regarded his interlocutors
straight in the eyes with a look that told them he was prepared to knock
them down at a moment's notice upon the least provocation, we should
probably have heard less of his absurdities. A man who even in his old
age could walk off with E. J. Trelawny {27a} under his arm (as Mr. Watts-
Dunton assures us Borrow could) was certainly not one to be trifled with.

Borrow's absolute unconventionality was of course an offence to many; to
Englishmen, who were dreaming in the fifties of a kind of industrial
millennium, with Cobden as the prophet and Macaulay as the preacher of a
new gospel of commercial prosperity and universal peace and progress,
Borrow's pre-rail