Hours in a Library, Volume 3 / New Edition, with Additions

by Leslie Stephen

There are a few familiar books in which a happy combination of circumstances has provided us with a true country idyll, fresh and racy from the soil, not consciously constructed by the most skilful artistic hand. Two of them have a kind of acknowledged pre-eminence in their own department. The man is not to be envied who has not in his boyhood fallen in love with Izaak Walton and White of Selborne. The boy, indeed, is happily untroubled as to the true source of the charm. He pores over the 'Compleat Angler' with the impression that he will gain some hints for beguiling, if not the wily carp, who is accounted the water-fox, at least the innocent roach, who 'is accounted the water-sheep for his simplicity or foolishness.' His mouth waters as he reads the directions for converting the pike—that compound of mud and needles—into 'a dish of meat too good for any but anglers or very honest men;' a transformation which, if authentic, is little less than miraculous. He does not ask what is the secret of the charm of the book even for those to whom fishing is an abomination—a charm which induced even the arch-cockney Dr. Johnson, in spite of his famous definition of angling, to prompt the republication of this angler's bible. It is only as he grows older, and has plodded through other sporting literature, that he can at all explain why the old gentleman's gossip is so fascinating. Walton, undoubtedly, is everywhere charming for his pure simple English, and the unostentatious vein of natural piety which everywhere lies just beneath the surface of his writing. Now and then, however, in reading the 'Lives,' we cannot quite avoid a sense that this excellent tradesman has just a touch of the unctuous about him. He is given—it is a fault from which hagiographers can scarcely be free—to using the rose-colour a little too freely. He holds towards his heroes the relation of a sentimental churchwarden to a revered parish parson. We fancy that the eyes of the preacher would turn instinctively to Walton's seat when he wished to catch an admiring glance from an upturned face, and to assure himself that he was touching the 'sacred fount of sympathetic tears.' We imagine Walton lingering near the porch to submit a deferential compliment as to the 'florid and seraphical' discourse to which he has been listening, and scarcely raising his glance above the clerical shoe-buckles. A portrait taken from this point of view is apt to be rather unsatisfactory. Yet, in describing the 'sweet humility' of a George Herbert or of the saintly Mr. Farrer, the tone is at least in keeping, and is consistent even with an occasional gleam of humour, as in the account of poor Hooker, tending sheep and rocking the cradle under stringent feminine supremacy. It is less satisfactory when we ask Walton to throw some light upon the curiously enigmatic character of Donne, with its strange element of morbid gloom, and masculine passion, and subtle and intense intellect. Donne married the woman he loved, in spite of her father and to the injury of his own fortunes. 'His marriage,' however, observes the biographer, 'was the remarkable error of his life; an error which, though he had a wit able and very apt to maintain paradoxes, yet he was very far from justifying it.' From our point of view, the only error was in the desire to justify an action of which he should have been proud. We must make allowance for the difference in Walton's views of domestic authority; but we feel that his prejudice disqualifies him from fairly estimating a character of great intrinsic force. A portrait of Donne cannot be adequately brought within the lines accepted by the writer of orthodox and edifying tracts.

In spite of this little failing, this rather excessive subservience to the respectabilities, the 'Lives' form a delightful book; but we get the genuine Walton at full length in his 'Angler.' It was first published in dark days; when the biographer might be glad that his pious heroes had been taken from the sight of the coming evil; when the scattered survivors of his favourite school of divines and poets were turned out of their well-beloved colleges and parsonages, hiding in dark corners or plotting with the melancholy band of exiles in France and Holland; when Walton, instead of listening to the sound and witty discourses of Donne, would find the pulpit of his parish church profaned by some fanatical Puritan, expounding the Westminster Confession in place of the Thirty-nine Articles. The good Walton found consolation in the almost religious pursuit of his hobby. He fortified himself with the authority of such admirable and orthodox anglers as Sir Henry Wotton and Dr. Nowel, Dean of St. Paul's. Dr. Nowel had, 'like an honest angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is printed with our good old service-book;' for an angler, it seems, is most likely to know that the road to heaven is not through 'hard questions.' The dean died at the age of ninety-five, in perfect possession of his faculties; and ''tis said that angling and temperance were great causes of those blessings.' Evidently Walton had somehow taken for granted that there is an inherent harmony between angling and true religion, which of course for him implies the Anglican religion. He does not trust himself in the evil times to grumble openly, or to indulge in more than an occasional oblique reference to the dealers in hard questions and metaphysical dogmatism. He takes his rod, leaves the populous city behind him, and makes a day's march to the banks of the quiet Lea, where he can meet a likeminded friend or two; sit in the sanded parlour of the country inn, and listen to the milkmaid singing that 'smooth song made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago,' before English fields had been drenched with the blood of Roundheads and Cavaliers; or lie under a tree, watching his float till the shower had passed, and then calling to mind what 'holy Mr. Herbert says of such days and flowers as these.' Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright!—but everybody has learnt to share Walton's admiration, and the quotation would now be superfluous. It is nowhere so effective as with Walton's illustrations. We need not, indeed, remember the background of storm to enjoy the quiet sunshine and showers on the soft English landscape, which Walton painted so lovingly. The fact that he was living in the midst of a turmoil, in which the objects of his special idolatry had been so ruthlessly crushed and scattered, may help to explain the intense relish for the peaceful river-side life. His rod was the magic wand to interpose a soft idyllic mist between his eyes and such scenes as were visible at times from the windows of Whitehall. He loved his paradise the better because it was an escape from a pandemonium. But whatever the cause of his enthusiasm, its sincerity and intensity are the main cause of his attractiveness. Many poets of Walton's time loved the country as well as he, and showed it in some of the delicate lyrics which find an appropriate setting in his pages. But we have to infer their exquisite appreciation of country sights and sounds from such brief utterances, or from passing allusions in dramatic scenes. Nobody can doubt that Shakespeare loved daffodils, or a bank of wild thyme, or violets, as keenly as Wordsworth. When he happens to mention them, his voice trembles with fine emotion. But none of the poets of the time dared to make a passion for the country the main theme of their more pretentious song. They thought it necessary to idealise and transmute; to substitute an indefinite Arcadia for plain English fields, and to populate it with piping swains and nymphs, Corydons and Amorets and Phyllises. Poor Hodge or Cis were only allowed to appear when they were minded to indulge in a little broad comedy. The coarse rustics had to be washed and combed before they could present themselves before an aristocratic audience; and plain English hills and rivers to be provided with tutelary gods and goddesses, fitted for the gorgeous pageantry of a country masque. Far be it from me—with the fear of æsthetic critics before my eyes—to say that very beautiful poems might not be produced under these conditions. It is proper, as I am aware, to admire Browne's 'Britannia's Pastorals,' and to speak reverently of Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' and Ben Jonson's 'Sad Shepherd.' I only venture to suggest here that such work is caviare to the multitude; that it requires a fine literary sense, a happy superiority to dull realistic suggestion, and a power of accepting the conventional conditions which the artist has to accept for his guidance. Possibly I may go so far as to hint without offence that the necessity of using this artificial apparatus was not in itself an advantage. A great master of harmony, with a mind overflowing with majestic imagery, might achieve such triumphs as 'Comas' and 'Lycidas,' in which even the Arcadian pipe is made to utter the true organ-tones. We forgive any incongruities or artificialities when they are lost in such a blaze of poetry. The atmosphere of Arcadia was not as yet sickly enough to asphyxiate a Milton; but it was ceasing to be wholesome; and the weaker singers who imbibed it suffered under distinct attacks of drowsiness.

Walton's good sense, or his humility, or perhaps the simple ardour of his devotion to his hobby, encouraged him to deal in realities. He gave the genuine sentiment which his contemporaries would only give indirectly, transfigured and bedizened with due ornaments of classic or romantic pattern. There is just a faint touch of unreality—a barely perceptible flavour of the sentimental—about his personages; but only enough to give a permissible touch of pastoral idealism. Walton is painting directly from the life. The 'honest alehouse,' where he finds 'a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall,' was standing then on the banks of the Lea, as in quiet country nooks, here and there, occasional representatives of the true angler's rest are still to be found, not entirely corrupted by the modern tourist. The good man is far too much in earnest to be aiming at literary ornament; he is a genuine simple-minded enthusiast revealing his kindly nature by a thousand unconscious touches. The common objection is a misunderstanding. Everybody quotes the phrase about using the frog 'as though you loved him;' and it is the more piquant as following one of his characteristically pious remarks. The frog's mouth, he tells, grows up for six months, and he lives for six months without eating, 'sustained, none but He whose name is Wonderful knows how.' He reverently admires the care taken of the frog by Providence, without drawing any more inference for his own conduct than if he were a modern physiologist. It is just this absolute unconsciousness which makes his love of the sport attractive. He has never looked at it from the frog's point of view. Your modern angler has to excuse himself by some scientific hypothesis as to feeling in the lower animals, and thereby betrays certain qualms of conscience which had not yet come to light in Walton's day. He is no more cruel than a schoolboy, 'ere he grows to pity.' He is simply discharging his functions as a part of nature, like the pike or the frog; and convinced, at the very bottom of his heart, that the angler represents the most eminent type of enjoyment, and should be the humble inheritor of the virtues of the fishers of Galilee. The gentlest and most pious thoughts come naturally into his mind whilst his worm is wriggling on his hook to entice the luckless trout. It is particularly pleasant to notice the quotations, which give a certain air of learning to his book. We see that the love of angling had become so ingrained in his mind as to direct his reading as well as to provide him with amusement. We fancy him poring on winter evenings over the pages of Aldrovandus and Gesner and Pliny and Topsell's histories of serpents and four-footed beasts, and humbly accepting the teaching of more learned men, who had recorded so many strange facts unobserved by the simple angler. He produces a couple of bishops, Dubravius and Thurso, as eye-witnesses, to testify to a marvellous anecdote of a frog jumping upon a pike's head and tearing out his eyes, after 'expressing malice or anger by swollen cheeks and staring eyes.' Even Walton cannot forbear a quiet smile at this quaint narrative. But he is ready to believe, in all seriousness, that eels, 'like some kinds of bees and wasps,' are bred out of dew, and to confirm it by the parallel case of young goslings bred by the sun 'from the rotten planks of an old ship and hatched up trees.' Science was not a dry museum of hard facts, but a quaint storehouse of semi-mythical curiosities; and therefore excellently fitted to fill spare hours, when he could not meditatively indulge in 'the contemplative man's recreation.' Walton found some queer texts for his pious meditations, and his pursuit is not without its drawbacks. But his quaintness only adds a zest to our enjoyment of his book; and we are content to fall in with his humour, and to believe for the nonce that the love of a sport which so fascinates this simple, kindly, reverent nature must be, as he takes for granted, the very crowning grace of a character moulded on the principles of sound Christian philosophy. Angling becomes synonymous with purity of mind and simplicity of character.

Mr. Lowell, in one of the most charming essays ever written about a garden, takes his text from White of Selborne, and admirably explains the charm of that worthy representative of the Waltonian spirit. 'It is good for us now and then,' says Mr. Lowell, 'to converse in a world like Mr. White's, where man is the least important of animals;' to find one's whole world in a garden, beyond the reach of wars and rumours of wars. White does not give a thought to the little troubles which were disturbing the souls of Burke and George III. The 'natural term of a hog's life has more interest for him than that of an empire;' he does not trouble his head about diplomatic complications whilst he is discovering that the odd tumbling of rooks in the air is caused by their turning over to scratch themselves with one claw. The great events of his life are his making acquaintance with a stilted plover, or his long—for it was protracted over ten years—and finally triumphant passion for 'an old family tortoise.' White of Selborne did not live in the rough old days when a country house had occasionally to be a fastness; nor in our own, when he would have to consider whether his property ought not to be 'nationalized.' He was merely a good, kindly, domestic gentleman, on friendly terms with the parson and the gamekeeper, and ready for a chat with the rude forefathers of the hamlet. His horizon, natural and unnatural, is bounded by the soft round hills and the rich hangers of his beloved Hampshire country. There is something specially characteristic in his taste for scenery. Though 'I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of thirty years,' he says, 'I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year;' and he calls 'Mr. Ray' to witness that there is nothing finer in any part of Europe. 'For my own part,' he says, 'I think there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspects of chalk hills in preference to those of stone, which are rugged, broken, abrupt, and shapeless.' I, for my part, agree with Mr. White—so long, at least, as I am reading his book. The Downs have a singular charm in the exquisite play of long, gracefully undulating lines which bound their gentle edges. If not a 'majestic range of mountains,' as judged by an Alpine standard, there is no want of true sublimity in their springing curves, especially when harmonised by the lights and shadows under cloud-masses driving before a broad south-westerly gale; and when you reach the edge of a great down, and suddenly look down into one of the little hollows where a village with a grey church tower and a grove of noble elms nestles amidst the fold of the hills, you fancy that in such places of refuge there must still be relics of the quiet domesticities enjoyed by Gilbert White. Here, one fancies, it must be good to live; to discharge, at an easy rate, all the demands of a society which is but a large family, and find ample excitement in studying the rambles of a tortoise, forming intimacies with moles, crickets and fieldmice, and bats, and brown owls, and watching the swifts and the nightjars wheeling round the old church tower, or hunting flies at the edge of the wood in the quiet summer evening.

In rambling through the lanes sacred to the memory of White, you may (in fancy, at least) meet another figure not at first sight quite in harmony with the clerical Mr. White. He is a stalwart, broad-chested man in the farmer's dress, even ostentatiously representing the old British yeoman brought up on beer and beef, and with a certain touch of pugnacity suggestive of the retired prizefighter. He stops his horse to chat with a labourer breaking stones by the roadside, and informs the gaping rustic that wages are made bad and food dear by the diabolical machinations of the Tories, and the fundholders and the boroughmongers, who are draining away all the fatness of the land to nourish the portentous 'wen' called London. He leaves the man to meditate on this suggestion, and jogs off to the nearest country town, where he will meet the farmers at their ordinary, and deliver a ranting radical address. The squire or the parson who recognises William Cobbett in this sturdy traveller, will mutter a hearty objurgation, and wish that the disturber of rustic peace could make a closer acquaintance with the neighbouring horsepond. Possibly most readers who hear his name have vaguely set down Cobbett as one of the demagogues of the anti-reforming days, and remember little more than the fact that he dabbled in some rather questionable squabbles, and brought back Tom Paine's bones from America. But it is worth while to read Cobbett, and especially the 'Rural Rides,' not only to enjoy his fine homespun English, but to learn to know the man a little better. Whatever the deserts or demerits of Cobbett as a political agitator, the true man was fully as much allied to modern Young England and the later type of conservatism as to the modern radical. He hated the Scotch 'feelosophers'—as he calls them—Parson Malthus, the political communists, the Manchester men, the men who would break up the old social system of the country, at the bottom of his heart; and, whatever might be his superficial alliances, he loved the old quiet country life when Englishmen were burly, independent yeomen, each equal to three frog-eating Frenchmen. He remembered the relics of the system in the days of his youth; he thought that it had begun to decay at the time of the Reformation, when grasping landlords and unprincipled statesmen had stolen Church property on pretence of religion; but ever since, the growth of manufactures, and corruption, and stockjobbing had been unpopulating the country to swell the towns, and broken up the old, wholesome, friendly English life. That is the text on which he is always dilating with genuine enthusiasm, and the belief, true or false, gives a pleasant flavour to his intense relish for true country scenery.

He looks at things, it is true, from the point of view of a farmer, not of a landscape-painter or a lover of the picturesque. He raves against that 'accursed hill' Hindhead; he swears that he will not go over it; and he tells us very amusingly how, in spite of himself, he found himself on the very 'tip top' of it, in a pelting rain, owing to an incompetent guide. But he loves the woodlands and the downs, and bursts into vivid enthusiasm at fine points of view. He is specially ecstatic in White's country. 'On we trotted,' he says, 'up this pretty green lane, and, indeed, we had been coming gently and gradually up-hill for a good while. The lane was between high banks, and pretty high stuff growing on the banks, so that we could see no distance from us, and could receive not the smallest hint of what was so near at hand. The lane had a little turn towards the end, so that we came, all in a moment, at the very edge of the hanger; and never in my life was I so surprised and delighted! I pulled up my horse, and sat and looked. It was like looking from the top of a castle down into the sea, except that the valley was land and not water. I looked at my servant to see what effect this unexpected sight had upon him. His surprise was as great as mine, though he had been bred amongst the North Hampshire hills. Those who have so strenuously dwelt on the dirt and dangers of this road have said not a word about the beauties, the matchless beauties, of the scenery.' And Cobbett goes on to describe the charms of the view over Selborne, and to fancy what it will be 'when trees, and hangers, and hedges are in leaf, the corn waving, the meadows bright, and the hops upon the poles,' in language which is not after the modern style of word-painting, but excites a contagious enthusiasm by its freshness and sincerity. He is equally enthusiastic soon afterwards at the sight of Avington Park and a lake swarming with wild fowl; and complains of the folly of modern rapid travelling. 'In any sort of carriage you cannot get into the real country places. To travel in stage-coaches is to be hurried along by force in a box with an air-hole in it, and constantly exposed to broken limbs, the danger being much greater than that of ship-board, and the noise much more disagreeable, while the company is frequently not a great deal more to one's liking.' What would Cobbett have said to a railway? And what has become of the old farmhouse on the banks of the Mole, once the home of 'plain manners and plentiful living,' with 'oak clothes-chests, oak bedsteads, oak chests of drawers, and oak tables to eat on, long, strong, and well supplied with joint stools?' Now, he sighs, there is a 'parlour! aye, and a carpet, and bell-pull too! and a mahogany table, and the fine chairs, and the fine glass, and all as barefaced upstart as any stockjobber in the kingdom can boast of!' Probably the farmhouse has followed the furniture, and, meanwhile, what has become of the fine old British hospitality, when the farmer and his lads and lasses dined at one table, and a solid Englishman did not squeeze money out of his men's wages to surround himself with trumpery finery?

To say the truth, Cobbett's fine flow of invective is a little too exuberant, and overlays too deeply the picturesque touches of scenery and the occasional bits of autobiography which recall his boyish experience of the old country life. It would be idle to inquire how far his vision of the old English country had any foundation in fact. Our hills and fields may be as lovely as ever; and there is still ample room for the lovers of 'nature' in Scotch moors and lochs, or even amongst the English fells, or among the storm-beaten cliffs of Devon and Cornwall. But nature, as I have said, is not the country. We are not in search of the scenery which appears now as it appeared in the remote days when painted savages managed to raise a granite block upon its supports for the amusement of future antiquaries. We want the country which bears the impress of some characteristic social growth; which has been moulded by its inhabitants as the inhabitants by it, till one is as much adapted to the other as the lichen to the rock on which it grows. How bleak and comfortless a really natural country may be is apparent to the readers of Thoreau. He had all the will to become a part of nature, and to shake himself free from the various trammels of civilised life, and he had no small share of the necessary qualifications; but one cannot read his account of his life by Walden pond without a shivering sense of discomfort. He is not really acclimatised; so far from being a true child of nature, he is a man of theories, a product of the social state against which he tries to revolt. He does not so much relish the wilderness as to go out into the wilderness in order to rebuke his contemporaries. There is something harsh about him and his surroundings, and he affords an unconscious proof that something more is necessary for the civilised man who would become a true man of the woods than simply to strip off his clothes. He has got tolerably free from tailors; but he still lives in the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge debating-rooms.

To find a life really in harmony with a rustic environment, we must not go to raw settlements where man is still fighting with the outside world, but to some region where a reconciliation has been worked out by an experience of centuries. And amidst all the restlessness of modern improvers we may still find a few regions where the old genius has not been quite exorcised. Here and there, in country lanes, and on the edge of unenclosed commons, we may still meet the gipsy—the type of a race adapted to live in the interstices of civilisation, having something of the indefinable grace of all wild animals, and yet free from the absolute savagery of the genuine wilderness. To mention gipsies is to think of George Borrow; and I always wonder that the author of the 'Bible in Spain' and 'Lavengro' is not more popular. Certainly, I have found no more delightful guide to the charming nooks and corners of rural England. I would give a good deal to identify that remarkable dingle in which he met so singular a collection of characters. Does it really exist, I wonder, anywhere on this island? or did it ever exist? and, if so, has it become a railway-station, and what has become of Isopel Berners and 'Blazing Bosville, the flaming Tinman?' His very name is as good as a poem, and the battle in which Borrow floored the Tinman by that happy left-handed blow is, to my mind, more delightful than the fight in 'Tom Brown,' or that in which Dobbin acted as the champion of Osborne. Borrow is a 'humourist' of the first water. He lives in a world of his own—a queer world with laws peculiar to itself, and yet one which has all manner of odd and unexpected points of contact with the prosaic world of daily experience. Borrow's Bohemianism is no revolt against the established order. He does not invoke nature or fly to the hedges because society is corrupt or the world unsatisfying, or because he has some kind of new patent theory of life to work out. He cares nothing for such fancies. On the contrary, he is a staunch conservative, full of good old-fashioned prejudices. He seems to be a case of the strange re-appearance of an ancestral instinct under altered circumstances. Some of his forefathers must have been gipsies by temperament if not by race; and the impulses due to that strain have got themselves blended with the characteristics of the average Englishman. The result is a strange and yet, in a way, harmonious and original type which made the 'Bible in Spain' a puzzle to the average reader. The name suggested a work of the edifying class. Here was a good respectable emissary of the Bible Society going to convert poor papists by a distribution of the Scriptures. He has returned to write a long tract setting forth the difficulties of his enterprise, and the stiff-neckedness of the Spanish people. The luckless reader who took up the book on that understanding was destined to a strange disappointment. True, Borrow appeared to take his enterprise quite seriously, indulges in the proper reflections, and gets into the regulation difficulty involving an appeal to the British minister. But it soon appears that his Protestant zeal is somehow mixed up with a passion for strange wanderings in the queerest of company. To him Spain is not the land of staunch Catholicism, or of Cervantes, or of Velasquez, and still less a country of historic or political interest. Its attraction is in the picturesque outcasts who find ample roaming-ground in its wilder regions. He regards them, it is true, as occasional subjects for a little proselytism. He tells us how he once delivered a moving address to the gipsies in their own language to his most promising congregation. When he had finished he looked up and found himself the centre of all eyes, each pair contorted by a hideous squint, rivalling each other in frightfulness; and the performance, which he seems to have thoroughly appreciated, pretty well expressed the gipsy view of his missionary enterprise. But they delighted to welcome him in his other character as one of themselves, and yet as dropping amongst them from the hostile world outside. And, certainly, no one not thoroughly at home with gipsy ways, gipsy modes of thought, to whom it comes quite naturally to put up in a den of cutthroats, or to enter the field of his missionary enterprise in company with a professional brigand travelling on business, could have given us so singular a glimpse of the most picturesque elements of a strange country. Your respectable compiler of handbooks might travel for years in the same districts all unconscious that passing vagabonds were so fertile in romance. The freemasonry which exists amongst the class lying outside the pale of respectability enables Borrow to fall in with adventures full of mysterious fascination. He passes through forests at night, and his horse suddenly stops and trembles, whilst he hears heavy footsteps and rustling branches, and some heavy body is apparently dragged across the road by panting but invisible bearers. He enters a shadowy pass, and is met by a man with a face streaming with blood, who implores him not to go forwards into the hands of a band of robbers; and Borrow is too sleepy and indifferent to stop, and jogs on in safety without meeting the knife which he half expected. 'It was not so written,' he says, with the genuine fatalism of your hand-to-mouth Bohemian. He crosses a wild moor with a half-witted guide, who suddenly deserts him at a little tavern. After a wild gallop on a pony, apparently half-witted also, he at last rejoins the guide resting by a fountain. This gentleman condescends to explain that he is in the habit of bolting after a couple of glasses, and never stops till he comes to running water. The congenial pair lose themselves at nightfall, and the guide observes that if they should meet the Estadéa, which are spirits of the dead riding with candle in their hands—a phenomenon happily rare in this region—he shall 'run and run till he drowns himself in the sea, somewhere near Muros.' The Estadéa do not appear, but Borrow and his guide come near being hanged as Don Carlos and a nephew, escaping only by the help of a sailor who knows the English words knife and fork, and can therefore testify to Borrow's nationality; and is finally liberated by an official who is a devoted student of Jeremy Bentham. The queer stumbling upon a name redolent of everyday British life throws the surrounding oddity into quaint relief. But Borrow encounters more mysterious characters. There is the wondrous Abarbenell, whom he meets riding by night, and with whom he soon becomes hand and glove. Abarbenell is a huge figure in a broad-brimmed hat, who stares at him in the moonlight with deep calm eyes, and still revisits him in dreams. He has two wives and a hidden treasure of old coins, and when the gates of his house are locked, and the big dogs loose in the court, he dines off ancient plate made before the discovery of America. There are many of his race amongst the priesthood, and even an Archbishop, who died in great renown for sanctity, had come by night to kiss his father's hand. Nor can any reader forget the singular history of Benedict Mol, the wandering Swiss, who turns up now and then in the course of his search for the hidden treasure at Compostella. Men who live in strange company learn the advantage of not asking questions, or following out delicate inquiries; and these singular figures are the more attractive because they come and go, half-revealing themselves for a moment, and then vanishing into outside mystery; as the narrator himself sometimes merges into the regions of absolute commonplace, and then dives down below the surface into the remotest recesses of the social labyrinth.

In Spain there may be room for such wild adventures. In the trim, orderly, English country we might fancy they had gone out with the fairies. And yet Borrow meets a decayed pedlar in Spain who seems to echo his own sentiments; and tells him that even the most prosperous of his tribe who have made their fortunes in America, return in their dreams to the green English lanes and farmyards. 'There they are with their boxes on the ground displaying their goods to the honest rustics and their dames and their daughters, and selling away and chaffering and laughing just as of old. And there they are again at nightfall in the hedge alehouses, eating their toasted cheese and their bread, and drinking the Suffolk ale, and listening to the roaring song and merry jests of the labourers.' It is the old picturesque country life which fascinates Borrow, and he was fortunate enough to plunge into the heart of it before it had been frightened away by the railways. 'Lavengro' is a strange medley, which is nevertheless charming by reason of the odd idiosyncrasy which fits the author to interpret this fast vanishing phase of life. It contains queer controversial irrelevance—conversations or stories which may or may not be more or less founded on fact, tending to illustrate the pernicious propagandism of Popery, the evil done by Sir Walter Scott's novels, and the melancholy results of the decline of pugilism. And then we have satire of a simple kind upon literary craftsmen, and excursions into philology which show at least an amusing dash of innocent vanity. But the oddity of these quaint utterances of a humourist who seeks to find the most congenial mental food in the Bible, the Newgate Calendar, and in old Welsh literature, is in thorough keeping with the situation. He is the genuine tramp whose experience is naturally made up of miscellaneous waifs and strays; who drifts into contact with the most eccentric beings, and parts company with them at a moment's notice, or catching hold of some stray bit of out-of-the-way knowledge follows it up as long as it amuses him. He is equally at home compounding narratives of the lives of eminent criminals for London booksellers, or making acquaintance with thimbleriggers, or pugilists, or Armenian merchants, or becoming a hermit in his remote dingle, making his own shoes and discussing theology with a postboy, a feminine tramp, and a Jesuit in disguise. The compound is too quaint for fiction, but is made interesting by the quaint vein of simplicity and the touch of genius which brings out the picturesque side of his roving existence, and yet leaves one in doubt how far the author appreciates his own singularity. One old gipsy lady in particular, who turns up at intervals, is as fascinating as Meg Merrilies, and at once made life-like and more mysterious. 'My name is Herne, and I comes of the hairy ones!' are the remarkable words by which she introduces herself. She bitterly regrets the intrusion of a Gentile into the secrets of the Romanies, and relieves her feelings by administering poison to the intruder, and then trying to poke out his eye as he is lying apparently in his last agonies. But she seems to be highly respected by her victim as well as by her own people, and to be acting in accordance with the moral teaching of her tribe. Her design is frustrated by the appearance of a Welsh Methodist preacher, who, like every other strange being, is at once compelled to unbosom himself to this odd confessor. He fancies himself to have committed the unpardonable sin at the age of six, and is at once comforted by Borrow's sensible observation that he should not care if he had done the same thing twenty times over at the same period. The grateful preacher induces his consoler to accompany him to the borders of Wales; but there Borrow suddenly stops on the ground that he should prefer to enter Wales in a suit of superfine black, mounted on a powerful steed like that which bore Greduv to the fight of Catrath, and to be welcomed at a dinner of the bards, as the translator of the odes of the great Ab Gwilym. And Mr. Petulengro opportunely turns up at the instant, and Borrow rides back with him, and hears that Mrs. Herne has hanged herself, and celebrates the meeting by a fight without gloves, but in pure friendliness, and then settles down to the life of a blacksmith in his secluded dingle.

Certainly it is a queer topsy-turvy world to which we are introduced in 'Lavengro.' It gives the reader the sensation of a strange dream in which all the miscellaneous population of caravans and wayside tents make their exits and entrances at random, mixed with such eccentrics as the distinguished author, who has a mysterious propensity for touching odd objects as a charm against evil. All one's ideas are dislocated when the centre of interest is no longer in the thick of the crowd, but in that curious limbo whither drift all the odd personages who live in the interstices without being caught by the meshes of the great network of ordinary convention. Perhaps the oddity repels many readers; but to me it always seems that Borrow's dingle represents a little oasis of genuine romance—a kind of half-visionary fragment of fairyland, which reveals itself like the enchanted castle in the vale of St. John, and then vanishes after tantalising and arousing one's curiosity. It will never be again discovered by any flesh-and-blood traveller; but, in my imaginary travels, I like to rusticate there for a time, and to feel as if the gipsy was the true possessor of the secret of life, and we who travel by rail and read newspapers and consider ourselves to be sensible men of business, were but vexatious intruders upon this sweet dream. There must, one supposes, be a history of England from the Petulengro point of view, in which the change of dynasties recognised by Hume and Mr. Freeman, or the oscillations of power between Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone, appear in relative insignificance as more or less affecting certain police regulations and the inclosure of commons. It is pleasant for a time to feel as though the little rivulet were the main stream, and the social outcast the true centre of society. The pure flavour of the country life is only perceptible when one has annihilated all disturbing influences; and in that little dingle with its solitary forge beneath the woods haunted by the hairy Hernes, that desirable result may be achieved for a time, even in a London library.