His Vocation.
Three hundred years since Borrow would have been a gentleman adventurer: he would have dropped quietly down the river, and steered for the Spanish Main, bent upon making carbonadoes of your Don. But he came too late for that, and falling upon no sword and buckler age but one that was interested in Randal and Spring, he accepted that he found, and did his best to turn its conditions, into literature. As he had that admirable instinct of making the best of things which marks the true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring to the romantic mind than any Mingo or Comanch that ever traded a scalp. While as for your tricks
of fence—your immortal passado, your punto reverso—if that be no longer the right use for a gentleman, have not Spring and Langan fought their great battle on Worcester racecourse? and has not Cribb of Gloucestershire—that renowned, heroic, irresistible Thomas—beaten Molyneux the negro artist in the presence of twenty thousand roaring Britons? and shall the practice of an art which has rejoiced in such a master as the illustrious Game Chicken, Hannibal of the Ring, be held degrading by an Englishman of sufficient inches who, albeit a Tory and a High Churchman, is at bottom as thoroughgoing a Republican as ever took the word of command from Colonel Cromwell? And if all this fail, if he get nobody to put on the gloves with him, if the tents of the Romany prove barren of interest, if the king’s highway be vacant of adventure as Mayfair, he has still philology to fall back upon, he can still console himself with the study of strange tongues, he can still exult in a peculiar superiority by quoting the great Ab Gwylim where the baser sort of persons is content with Shakespeare. So that what with these and some kindred diversions—a little horse-whispering and ale-drinking, the damnation of Popery, the study of the Bible—he can manage not merely to live but to live so fully and richly as to be the envy of some and the amazement of all. That, as life goes and as the world wags, is given to few.
Add to it the credit of having written as good a book about Spain as ever was written in any language, the happiness of having dreamed and partly lived that book ere it was written, the perfect joy of being roundly abused by everybody, and the consciousness of being different from everybody and of giving at least as good as ever you got at several things the world is silly enough to hold in worship—as the Toryism of Sir Walter, or the niceness of Popery, or the pleasures of Society: and is it not plain that Borrow was a man uncommon fortunate, and that he enjoyed life as greatly as most men not savages who have possessed the fruition of this terrestrial sphere?