orrow was a man
uncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not
savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?

Ideals and Achievements.

He prepared his effects as studiously and almost as dexterously as Dumas
himself. His instinct of the picturesque was rarely indeed at fault; he
marshalled his personages and arranged his scene with something of that
passion for effect which entered so largely into the theory of M. le
Comte de Monte-Cristo. However closely disguised, himself is always the
heroic figure, and he is ever busy in arranging discovery and triumph. To
his chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a
slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own,
strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he
will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off
his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that
Lavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then--as the manner of
Lesage commands--the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted
courses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once more
and passes on to other achievements: a mad preacher to succour, a priest
to baffle, some tramp to pound into a jelly of humility, an applewoman to
mystify, a horse-chaunter to swindle, a pugilist to study and help and
portray. But whatever it be, Lavengro emerges from the ordeal modestly,
unobtrusively, quietly, most consciously magnificent. Circumstantial as
Defoe, rich in combinations as Lesage, and with such an instinct of the
picturesque, both personal and local, as none of these possessed, this
strange wild man holds on his strange wild way, and leads you captive to
the end. His dialogue is copious and appropriate: you feel that like Ben
Jonson he is dictating rather than reporting, that he is less faithful
and exact than imaginative and determined; but you are none the less
pleased with it, and suspicious though you be that the voice is
Lavengro's and the hands are the hands of some one else, you are glad to
surrender to the illusion, and you regret when it is dispelled. Moreover,
that all of it should be set down in racy, nervous, idiomatic English,
with a kind of eloquence at once primitive and scholarly, precious but
homely--the speech of an artist in sods and turfs--if at first it
surprise and charm yet ends by seeming so natural and just that you