of the senses, they had no determining sway over his life or thought.  If there be any man in English history whom such a summary of traits as this recalls, it is Dean Swift.  Nevertheless Borrow’s differences from him are far greater than the resemblances between them.  Giant force was in both of them; both were enigmas; but the deeper we penetrate into Borrow, the more we like him; not so with the blue-eyed Dean.  Borrow’s depths are dark and tortuous, but never miasmic; and as we grope our way through them, we may stumble upon treasures, but never upon rottenness.

A man who can be assigned to no recognized type—­who flocks by himself, as the saying is—­cannot easily be portrayed:  we lose the main design in our struggle with the details.  Indeed, no two portraits of such a man can be alike:  they will vary according to the temperament and limitations of the painter.  It is safe to assert, however, that insatiable curiosity was at the base both of his character and of his achievements.  Instincts he doubtless had in plenty, but no intuitions; everything must be construed to him categorically.  But his capacity keeps pace with his curiosity; he promptly assimilates all he learns, and he can forget nothing.  Probably this investigating passion had its cause in his own unlikeness to the rest of us:  he was as a visitor from another planet, pledged to send home reports of all he saw here.  His success in finding strange things is prodigious:  his strange eye detects oddities and beauties to which we to the manner born were strange.  Adventures attend him everywhere, as the powers of earth and air on Prospero.  Here comes the King of the Vipers, the dry stubble crackling beneath his outrageous belly; yonder the foredoomed sailor promptly fulfills his own prediction, falling from the yard-arm into the Bay of Biscay; anon the ghastly visage of Mrs. Herne, of the Hairy Ones, glares for a moment out of the midnight hedge; again, a mysterious infatuation drives the wealthy idler from his bed out into the inclement darkness, and up to the topmost bough of the tree, which he must “touch” ere he can rest; and now, in the gloom of the memorable dingle, the horror of fear falls upon the amateur tinker, the Evil One grapples terribly with his soul, blots of foam fly from his lips, and he is dashed against the trees and stones.  An adventure, truly, fit to stand with any of mediaeval legend, and compared with which the tremendous combat with Blazing Bosville, the Flaming Tinman, is almost a relief.  But in what perilous Faery Land forlorn do all these and a thousand more strange and moving incidents take place?—­Why, in the quiet lanes and byways of nineteenth-century England, or perchance in priest-ridden Spain, where the ordinary traveler can for the life of him discover nothing more startling than beef and beer, garlic and crucifixes.  Adventures are in the adventurer.