This history of certain doings in a Staffordshire dingle, during the month of July 1825, begins with a battle-royal, which places Borrow high amongst the narrators of human conflicts from the days of the Iliad to those of Pierce Egan; yet the chapters that set forth this episode of the dingle are less concerned with the “gestes” than with the sayings of its occupants.  Rare, indeed, are the dramatic dialogues amid the sylvan surroundings of the tree-crowned hollow, that surpass in interest even the vivid details of the memorable fray between the flaming tinman and the pugilistic philologer.  Pre-eminent amongst the dialogues are those between the male occupant of the dingle and the popish propagandist, known as the man in black.  More fascinating still, perhaps, are the word-master’s conversations with Jasper; most wonderful of all, in the opinion of many, is his logomachy with Ursula under the thorn bush.  We shall not readily forget Jasper’s complaints that all the ’old-fashioned, good-tempered constables’ are going to be set aside, or his gloomy anticipations of the iron roads in which people are to ’thunder along in vehicles pushed forward by fire and smoke.’  As for his comparison of the gypsies to cuckoos, the roguish charring fellows, for whom every one has a bad word, yet whom every one is glad to greet once again when the spring comes round, or Ursula’s exposition of gypsy love and marriage beneath the hedge,—­these are Borrow at his best, as he is most familiar to us, in the open air among gypsies.  With the popish emissary it is otherwise:  his portrait is the creation of Borrow’s most studied hatred.  Yet it must be admitted that the man in black is a triumph of complex characterisation.  A joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine, sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in ear.  For the simple and credulous—­crosses and beads; for the hard-hearted and venal—­material considerations; for the cultured and educated—­a fine tissue of epigrams and anthropology; for the ladies—­flattery and badinage.  A spiritual ancestor of Anatole France’s marvellous full-length figure of Jerome Coignard, Borrow’s conception takes us back first to Rabelais and secondly to the seventeenth-century conviction of the profound Machiavellism of Jesuitry.

The man in black and Jasper are great, but the master attraction of the region that we are to traverse is admittedly Isopel Berners.  It will perhaps be observed that our heroine makes her appearance on the stage rather more in the fashion of Molly Seagrim than of that other engaging Amazon of romance, Diana Vernon, whose “long hair streaming in the wind” forms one single point of resemblance to our fair Isopel.  In other respects, certainly no two heroines could be more dissimilar.  Unaided even by the slightest