Next to Borrow’s vagabondage, which, though I tremble to say it, has a decidedly literary flavour, and his delightful camaraderie or willingness to hob-a-nob with everybody, I rank his eloquence.  Great is plot, though Borrow has but little, and that little mechanical; delightful is incident, and Borrow is full of incident—­e.g. the poisoning scene in Chapter LXXI., where will you match it, unless it be the very differently-treated scene of the robbers’ cave in The Heart of Midlothian? and glorious, too, is motion, and Borrow never stagnates, never gathers moss or mould.  But great also is eloquence.  ’If a book be eloquent,’ says Mr. Stevenson, that most distinguished writer, ’its words run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers.’  Eloquence is a little unfashionable just now.  We are not allowed very much of it in our romances and travels.  What are called ‘situations’ grow stronger every day, and language is strong too, but outbursts, apostrophes, rhapsodies no longer abound.  Perhaps they are forbidden by Art.  Nobody is ever eloquent in real life.  A man’s friends would not put up with it.  But a really eloquent book is a great possession.  Plots explode, and incidents, however varied and delightful, unless lit up by the occasional lightning-flash of true eloquence, must after a while lose their freshness.  Borrow was not afraid to be eloquent, nor were other writers of his time.  The first Lord Lytton is now a somewhat disparaged author, nor had Borrow any affection for him, considering him to belong to the kid-glove school; but Lytton’s eloquence, though often playing him shabby tricks, now dashing his head against the rocks of bathos, now casting him to sprawl unbecomingly amongst the oozy weeds of sentiment, will keep him alive for many a long day.  As I write, a passage in The Caxtons comes to my mind, and as it illustrates my meaning, I will take down The Caxtons and transcribe the passage, and let those laugh who may.  I will likewise christen it ’By the Fireside’:—­

O young reader, whoever thou art, or reader at least who has been young, canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou hast come back from that hard, stern world, which opens on thee when thou puttest thy foot out of the threshold of home, come back to the four quiet walls, wherein thine elders sit in peace, and seen with a sort of sad amaze how calm and undisturbed all is there?  That generation which has gone before thee in the path of passion, the generation of thy parents (not so many years, perchance, remote from thine own), how immovably far off, in its still repose, it seems from thy turbulent youth.  It has in it a stillness as of a classic age, antique as the statues of the Greeks, that tranquil monotony of routine into which those lives that preceded thee have merged, the occupations that they have found sufficing for their happiness by the fireside—­in