Self-forgetfulness is the essence of enjoyment, and the author who would confer pleasure must possess the art, or know the trick, of destroying for the time the reader’s own personality.  Undoubtedly the easiest way of doing this is by the creation of a host of rival personalities—­hence the number and the popularity of novels.  Whenever a novelist fails, his book is said to flag; that is, the reader suddenly (as in skating) comes bump down upon his own personality, and curses the unskillful author.  No lack of characters, and continual motion, is the easiest recipe for a novel, which like a beggar should always be kept “moving on.”  Nobody knew this better than Fielding, whose novels, like most good ones, are full of inns.

When those who are addicted to what is called “improving reading” inquire of you petulantly why you cannot find change of company and scene in books of travel, you should answer cautiously that when books of travel are full of inns, atmosphere, and motion, they are as good as any novel; nor is there any reason in the nature of things why they should not always be so, though experience proves the contrary.

The truth or falsehood of a book is immaterial.  George Borrow’s ’Bible in Spain’ is, I suppose, true; though now that I come to think of it in what is to me a new light, one remembers that it contains some odd things.  But was not Borrow the accredited agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society?  Did he not travel (and he had a free hand) at their charges?  Was he not befriended by our minister at Madrid, Mr. Villiers, subsequently Earl of Clarendon in the peerage of England?  It must be true:  and yet at this moment I would as lief read a chapter of the ‘Bible in Spain’ as I would ‘Gil Bias’; nay, I positively would give the preference to Senor Giorgio.  Nobody can sit down to read Borrow’s books without as completely forgetting himself as if he were a boy in the forest with Gurth and Wamba.

Borrow is provoking and has his full share of faults, and though the owner of a style, is capable of excruciating offences.  His habitual use of the odious word “individual” as a noun-substantive (seven times in three pages of ‘The Romany Rye’) elicits the frequent groan, and he is certainly once guilty of calling fish the “finny tribe.”  He believed himself to be animated by an intense hatred of the Church of Rome, and disfigures many of his pages by Lawrence-Boythorn-like tirades against that institution; but no Catholic of sense need on this account deny himself the pleasure of reading Borrow, whose one dominating passion was camaraderie, and who hob-a-nobbed in the friendliest spirit with priest and gipsy in a fashion as far beyond praise as it is beyond description by any pen other than his own.  Hail to thee, George Borrow!  Cervantes himself, ‘Gil Bias,’ do not more effectually carry their readers into the land of the Cid than does this miraculous agent of the Bible Society, by favor of whose pleasantness we can, any hour of the week, enter Villafranca by night, or ride into Galicia on an Andalusian stallion (which proved to be a foolish thing to do), without costing anybody a peseta, and at no risk whatever to our necks—­be they long or short.