hose
who do not contribute to the common stock proportionately to their
abilities and the opportunities they have of gain, and this is the source
of their uninterrupted happiness; fully this means they have no griping
usurer to grind them, no lordly possessor to trample on them, nor any
envyings to torment them; they have no settled habitations, but, like the
Scythian of old, remove from place to place, as often as their
convenience or pleasure requires it, which render their life a perpetual
source of the greatest variety.

"By what we have said above, and much more that we could add of the
happiness of these people and of their peculiar attachment to each other,
we may account for what has been matter of much surprise to the friends
of our hero, viz., his strong attachment, for the space of about forty
years, to this community, and his refusing the large offers that have
been made to quit their society."

Carew himself met with nothing but success in his various impersonations
of Tom o' Bedlam, a rat-catcher, a non-juring clergyman, a shipwrecked
Quaker, and an aged woman with three orphan grandchildren. He was
elected King of the Beggars, and lost the dignity only by deliberate
abdication. "The restraints of a town not suiting him after the free
rambling life he had led, he took a house in the country, and having
acquired some property on the decease of a relation, he was in a position
to purchase a residence more suited to his taste, and lived for some
years a quiet life 'respected best by those who knew him best.'"

A very different literary hero of Borrow's was William Cobbett, in spite
of his radical opinions. Cobbett was a man who wrote, as it were, with
his fist, not the tips of his fingers. When I begin to read him I think
at once of a small country town where men talk loudly to one another at a
distance or as they walk along in opposite directions, and the voices
ring as their heels do on the cobbles. He is not a man of arguments, but
of convictions. He is so full of convictions that, though not an
indolent man, he has no time for arguments. "On this stiff ground," he
says in North Wiltshire, "they grow a good many beans and give them to
the pigs with whey; which makes excellent pork for the _Londoners_; but
which must meet with a pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire."
When he was being shouted down at Lewes in 1822, and someone moved that
he should be put out of the room, he says: "I ros