ich, as he had the wisdom to make it the
seasoning and not the main substance of his literary fare, is never
disgusting. The secret of this may be, no doubt, in part sought in his
early familiarity with a great many foreign languages, some of whose
idioms he transplanted into English: but this is by no means the whole
of the receipt. Perhaps it is useless to examine analytically that
receipt's details, or rather (for the analysis may be said to be
compulsory on any one who calls himself a critic), useless to offer its
results to the reader. One point which can escape no one who reads with
his eyes open is the frequent, yet not too abundant, repetition of the
same or very similar words--a point wherein much of the secret of
persons so dissimilar as Carlyle, Borrow, and Thackeray consists. This
is a well-known fact--so well known indeed that when a person who
desires to acquire style hears of it, he often goes and does likewise,
with what result all reviewers know. The peculiarity of Borrow, as far
as I can mark it, is that, despite his strong mannerism, he never relies
on it as too many others, great and small, are wont to do. The character
sketches, of which, as I have said, he is so abundant a master, are
always put in the plainest and simplest English. So are his flashes of
ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often
one-sided, are of the first order of insight. I really do not know that,
in the mint-and-anise-and-cummin order of criticism, I have more than
one charge to make against Borrow. That is that he, like other persons
of his own and the immediately preceding time, is wont to make a most
absurd misuse of the word individual. With Borrow "individual" means
simply "person": a piece of literary gentility of which he, of all
others, ought to have been ashamed.

But such criticism has but very little propriety in the case of a
writer, whose attraction is neither mainly nor in any very great degree
one of pure form. His early critics compared him to Le Sage, and the
comparison is natural. But if it is natural, it is not extraordinarily
critical. Both men wrote of vagabonds, and to some extent of picaroons;
both neglected the conventionalities of their own language and
literature; both had a singular knowledge of human nature. But Le Sage
is one of the most impersonal of all great writers, and Borrow is one of
the most personal. And it is undoubtedly in the revelation of his
personality that