He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined to be sulky, as wayward as a man could be.  So far his catalogue of qualities does not seem to pick him as a winner.  But he had one great and rare gift.  He preserved through all his days a sense of the great wonder and mystery of life—­the child sense which is so quickly dulled.  Not only did he retain it himself, but he was word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also.  As he writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace.  It was all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to the light.  If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman there was something arresting in the words he said, something singular in her reply.  If he met a man in a public-house one felt, after reading his account, that one would wish to know more of that man.  If he approached a town he saw and made you see—­not a collection of commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but something very strange and wonderful, the winding river, the noble bridge, the old castle, the shadows of the dead.  Every human being, every object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol and reminder of the past.  He looked through a man at that which the man represented.  Was his name Welsh?  Then in an instant the individual is forgotten and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient Britons, intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower, mountain raiders and a thousand fascinating things.  Or is it a Danish name?  He leaves the individual in all his modern commonplace while he flies off to huge skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may remark that I have examined the said skulls with some care, and they seemed to me to be rather below the human average), to Vikings, Berserkers, Varangians, Harald Haardraada, and the innate wickedness of the Pope.  To Borrow all roads lead to Rome.

But, my word, what English the fellow could write!  What an organ-roll he could get into his sentences!  How nervous and vital and vivid it all is!

There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an ear for the music of prose.  Take the chapter in “Lavengro” of how the screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped in the Dingle.  The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle of Bunyan and Defoe.  And, observe the art of it, under all the simplicity—­notice, for example, the curious weird effect produced by the studied repetition of the word “dingle” coming ever round and round like the master-note in a chime.  Or take the passage about Britain towards the end of “The Bible in Spain.”  I hate quoting from these masterpieces, if only for the very selfish reason that my poor setting cannot afford to show up brilliants.  None the less, cost what it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of impassioned prose—­