d a wild fascination, a vivid
graphic power of description, a fresh originality, an athletic
simplicity, which give them a stamp of their own.'

[263] Theodore Watts-Dunton, Augustine Birrell, Francis Hindes Groome,
and Thomas Seccombe. Lionel Johnson's essay on Borrow is the more
valuable in its enthusiasm in that it was written by a Roman Catholic.
Writing in the _Outlook_ (April 1, 1899) he said:

'What the four books mean and are to their lovers is upon this sort.
Written by a man of intense personality, irresistible in his hold upon
your attention, they take you far afield from weary cares and business
into the enamouring airs of the open world, and into days when the
countryside was uncontaminated by the vulgar conventions which form the
worst side of "civilised" life in cities. They give you the sense of
emancipation, of manumission into the liberty of the winding road and
fragrant forest, into the freshness of an ancient country-life, into a
_milieu_ where men are not copies of each other. And you fall in with
strange scenes of adventure, great or small, of which a strange man is
the centre as he is the scribe; and from a description of a lonely glen
you are plunged into a dissertation upon difficult old tongues, and from
dejection into laughter, and from gypsydom into journalism, and
everything is equally delightful, and nothing that the strange man shows
you can come amiss. And you will hardly make up your mind whether he is
most Don Quixote, or Rousseau, or Luther, or Defoe; but you will always
love these books by a brave man who travelled in far lands, travelled
far in his own land, travelled the way of life for close upon eighty
years, and died in perfect solitude. And this will be the least you can
say, though he would not have you say it--_Requiescat in pace Viator_.'

[264] In _Res Judicatae_ 1892 (a paper reprinted from _The Reflector_,
Jan. 8, 1888), in his Introduction to _Lavengro_ (Macmillan, 1900), in
an essay entitled 'The Office of literature,' in the second series of
_Obiter Dicta_, and in an address at Norwich; on July 5, 1913, reprinted
in full in the _Eastern Daily Press_ of July 7, 1913.

[265] There are but three references to Borrow in Stevenson's writings,
all of them perfunctory. These are in _Memories and Portraits_ ('A
Gossip on a novel of Dumas''), in _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_
('Some aspects of Robert Burns'), and in _The Ideal House_.

[266] _The Spectator_, July 12, 19