the word, in all of them. He has not been
approached in merit by any romancer who has published books in our days,
except Charles Kingsley; and his work, if less varied in range and charm
than Kingsley's, has a much stronger and more concentrated flavour.
Moreover, he is the one English writer of our time, and perhaps of times
still farther back, who seems never to have tried to be anything but
himself; who went his own way all his life long with complete
indifference to what the public or the publishers liked, as well as to
what canons of literary form and standards of literary perfection
seemed to indicate as best worth aiming at. A most self-sufficient
person was Borrow, in the good and ancient sense, as well as, to some
extent, in the sense which is bad and modern. And what is more, he was
not only a self-sufficient person, but is very sufficient also to the
tastes of all those who love good English and good literature.

APPENDIX A

DE QUINCEY

A short time after the publication of my essay on De Quincey I learnt,
to my great concern, that it had given offence to his daughter Florence,
the widow of one of the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, Colonel Baird
Smith. Mrs. Baird Smith complained, in a letter to the newspapers, that
I had accused her father of untruthfulness, and requested the public to
suspend their judgment until the publication of certain new documents,
in the form of letters, which had been discovered. I might have replied,
if my intent had been hostile, that little fault could be justly found
with a critic of the existing evidence if new evidence were required to
confute him. But as the very last intention that I had in writing the
paper was to impute anything that can be properly called untruthfulness
to De Quincey, I thought it better to say so and to wait for the further
documents. In a subsequent private correspondence with Mrs. Baird Smith,
I found that what had offended her (her complaints being at first quite
general) was certain remarks on De Quincey's aristocratic acquaintances
as appearing in the _Autobiography_ and "not heard of afterwards,"
certain comments on the Malay incident and others like it, some on the
mystery of her father's money affairs, and the passage on his general
"impenetrability." The matter is an instance of the difficulty of
dealing with recent reputations, when the commentator gives his name.
Some really unkind things have been said of De Quincey; my intention was