Man and nature were Borrow’s study, but England was his love.  In him exalted patriotism touches its apogee.  How nobly and uncompromisingly is he jealous of her honor, her glory, and her independence!  In what eloquent apostrophes does he urge her to be true to her lofty traditions, to trample on base expediency and cleave to the brave and true!  In what resounding jeremiads does he denounce woe upon her traitors and seducers!  With what savage sarcasm and scorn does he dissect the soul of the “man in black”!  No other writing more powerful, picturesque, and idiomatic has been done in this century.  He will advocate no policy less austere than purity, courage, and truth.  There is in his zeal a narrowness that augments its strength, yet lessens its effect so far as practical issues are concerned.  He is an idealist:  but surely no young man can read his stern, throbbing pages without a kindling of the soul, and a resolve to be high in deed and aim; and there is no gauging the final influence of such spiritual stimulus.  England and mankind must be better for this lonely, indignant voice.

England, and England’s religion, and the Bible in its integrity,—­these are the controlling strings of Borrow’s harp.  Yet he had his youthful period of religious doubt and philosophic sophism:  has he not told how walls and ceilings rang with the “Hey!” of the man with the face of a lion, when the gray-haired boy intimated his skepticism?  But vicissitudes of soul and body, aided by the itinerant Welsh preacher, cleansed him of these errors, and he undertook and carried through the famous crusade recorded in ’The Bible in Spain’—­a narrative of adventure and devotion which fascinated and astonished England, and sets its author abreast of the great writers of his time.  It is as irresistible to-day as it was fifty years ago:  it stands alone; only Trelawny’s ‘Adventures of a Younger Son’ can be compared with it as narrative, and Trelawny’s book lacks the grand central feature which gives dignity and unity to Borrow’s.  Being a story of fact, ’The Bible in Spain’ lacks much of the literary art and felicity, as well as the imaginative charm, of ‘Lavengro’; but within its own scope it is great, and nothing can supersede it.

Gipsydom in all its aspects, though logically a side-issue with Borrow, was nevertheless the most noticeable thing relating to him:  it engaged and colored him on the side of his temperament; and in the picture we form of a man, temperament tells far more than intellect because it is more individual.  Later pundits have called in question the academic accuracy of Borrow’s researches in the Romany language:  but such frettings are beside the mark; Borrow is the only genuine expounder of Gipsyness that ever lived.  He laid hold of their vitals, and they of his; his act of brotherhood with Mr. Jasper Petulengro is but a symbol of his mystical alliance with the race.  This is not to say that he fathomed the heart of their mystery; the gipsies themselves cannot