But no sooner is this said than the necessity for instant and substantial qualification becomes urgent, for though Borrow’s personal vanity would have been wounded had he been ranked with the literary gentlemen who do business in words, his anger would have been justly aroused had he been told he did not know how to write.  He did know how to write, and he acquired the art in the usual way, by taking pains.  He might with advantage have taken more pains, and then he would have done better; but take pains he did.  In all his books he aims at producing a certain impression on the minds of his readers, and in order to produce that impression he was content to make sacrifices; hence his whimsicality, his out-of-the-wayness, at once his charm and his snare, never grows into wantonness and seldom into gross improbability.  He studied effects, as his frequent and impressive liturgical repetitions pleasingly demonstrate.  He had theories about most things, and may, for all I know, have had a theory of cadences.  For words he had no great feeling except as a philologist, and is capable of strange abominations.  ‘Individual’ pursues one through all his pages, where too are ‘equine species,’ ’finny tribe’; but finding them where we do even these vile phrases, and others nearly as bad, have a certain humour.

This chance remark brings me to the real point.  Borrow’s charm is that he has behind his books a character of his own, which belongs to his books as much as to himself; something which bears you up and along as does the mystery of the salt sea the swimmer.  And this something lives and stirs in almost every page of Borrow, whose restless, puzzling, teasing personality pervades and animates the whole.

He is the true adventurer who leads his life, not on the Stock Exchange amidst the bulls and bears, or in the House of Commons waiting to clutch the golden keys, or in South Africa with the pioneers and promoters, but with himself and his own vagrant moods and fancies.  There was no need for Borrow to travel far afield in search of adventures.  Mumpers’ Dell was for him as good an environment as Mexico; a village in Spain or Portugal served his turn as well as both the Indies; he was as likely to meet adventures in Pall Mall as in the far Soudan.  Strange things happen to him wherever he goes; odd figures step from out the hedgerow and engage him in wild converse; beggar-women read Moll Flanders on London Bridge; Armenian merchants cuff deaf and dumb clerks in London counting-houses; prize-fighters, dog-fanciers, Methodist preachers, Romany ryes and their rawnees move on and off.  Why should not strange things happen to Lavengro?  Why should not strange folk suddenly make their appearance before him and as suddenly take their departure?  Is he not strange himself?  Did he not puzzle Mr. Petulengro, excite the admiration of Mrs. Petulengro, the murderous hate of Mrs. Herne, and drive Isopel Berners half distracted?