for two such men to understand each other. When I told him of
Mr. Lang's angry onslaught upon Borrow in his notes to the
_Waverley Novels_, on account of his attacks upon Scott, he
said, 'Well, does he not deserve it?' When I told him of Miss
Cobbe's description of Borrow as a _poseur_, he said to me, 'I
told you the same scores of times. But I saw Borrow had
bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow in
Richmond Park. It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled
you.' Borrow's affection for Hake, however, was both strong and
deep, as I saw after Hake had gone to Germany and in a way
dropped out of Borrow's ken. Yet Hake was as good a man as ever
Borrow was, and for certain others with whom he was brought in
contact as full of a genuine affection as Borrow was
himself.[237]

Mr. Watts-Dunton refers here to Hake's asperities when speaking of
Borrow. They are very marked in the _Memoirs of Eighty Years_, and
nearly all the stories of Borrow's eccentricities that have been served
up to us by Borrow's biographers are due to Hake. It is here we read of
his snub to Thackeray. 'Have you read my Snob Papers in _Punch_?'
Thackeray asked him. 'In _Punch_?' Borrow replied. 'It is a periodical I
never look at.' He was equally rude, or shall we say Johnsonian,
according to Hake, when Miss Agnes Strickland asked him if she might
send him her _Queens of England_. He exclaimed, 'for God's sake don't,
madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them.'
Hake is responsible also for that other story about the woman who,
desirous of pleasing him, said, 'Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books
with so much pleasure!' On which he exclaimed, 'Pray, what books do you
mean, madam? Do you mean my account books?'[238] Dr. Johnson was guilty
of many such vagaries, and the readers of Boswell have forgiven him
everything because they are conveyed to them through the medium of a
hero-worshipper. Borrow never had a Boswell, and despised the literary
class so much that he never found anything in the shape of an apologist
until he had been long dead. The most competent of these, because
writing from personal knowledge, was Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, who
is known in literature as Theodore Watts, the author of _Aylwin_ and
_The Coming of Love_, and the writer of many acute and picturesque
criticisms. Mr. Watts-Dunton--who added his mother's name of Dunton