the arm-chair and corner appropriated to each—­how strangely they contrast thy own feverish excitement!  And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and then resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened!  Nothing had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world seems to have shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war!  And you sit down, crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no more, and smile mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one, you say nothing till the time comes for bed, and you take up your candle, and creep miserably to your lonely room.

This is not the eloquence of Borrow, though the thought might have been his; it may not be in that grand style of which we hear so much and read so little, but—­and this is the substance of the matter—­it is interesting, it is moving, and worth pages of choppy dialogue.  You read it, first of all, it may be in your youth, when your heart burnt within you as you wondered what was going to happen, but you can return to it in sober age and read it over again with a smile it has taken a lifetime to manufacture.  And then Miss Bronte’s books! what rhetoric is there!  And Eothen!  Why has not Eothen gone the way of all other traces of Eastern travel?  It has humour—­delightful humour, no doubt, but it is its eloquence, that picture of the burning, beating sun following the traveller by day, which keeps Eothen alive.

Borrow’s eloquence is splendid, manly, and desperately courageous.  What an apostrophe is that to old Crome at the end of the twenty-first chapter! Lavengro is full of riches.  As for his courage, who else could begin a passage ‘O England,’ and emerge triumphantly a page and a half lower down as Borrow does in The Bible in Spain?

O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath the wave of darkness!  Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown than thy past!  Or if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled the Old Queen of the water!  May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one nation to participate in thy downfall!  Of all fates, may it please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming ere extinct a scorn and a mockery for those self-same foes who now, though they envy and abhor thee, still fear thee, nay, even against their will, honour and respect thee!

Arouse thee, whilst yet there is time, and prepare thee for the combat of life and death!  Cast from thee the foul scurf which now encrusts thy robust limbs, which deadens their force, and makes them heavy and powerless!  Cast from thee thy false philosophers, who would fain decry