How sadly removed was such procedure from Borrow’s own ideal of reviewing, as set forth in the very volume under consideration!  Such operations should always, he held, be conducted in a spirit worthy of an editor of Quintilian, in a gentlemanly, Oxford-like manner.  No vituperation!  No insinuations!  Occasionally a word of admonition, but gently expressed as an Oxford M.A. might have expressed it.  Some one had ventured to call the Bible in Spain a grotesque book, but the utterance had been drowned in the chorus of acclamation.  Now Borrow complained that he had had the honour of being rancorously abused by every unmanly scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and every political and religious renegade in the kingdom.  His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by a swarm of gnats.  His worst passions were aroused; his most violent prejudices confirmed.  His literary zeal, never extremely alert, was sensibly diminished.

This last result at least was a calamity.  Nevertheless the great end had, in the main, already been accomplished.  Borrow had broken through the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked footprint on the sand.  The ‘great unknown’ had gone down beneath his associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large extent revealed himself—­a primitive man, with his breast by no means wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem of a complex humanity:  an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone gives savour to the wearisome process of “civilisation.”  For the conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute the genus homo of natural history.  Perhaps it was only to be expected that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should be received with a howl of incredulity.

Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day Emile Montegut realised to the full the true greatness, the originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow’s work.  Writing in September 1857 upon “Le Gentilhomme Bohemien” (an essay which appears in his Ecrivains Modernes de l’Angleterre, between studies on “Mistress Browning” and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow’s “humoristic Odyssey":—­

“Unfinished and fragmentary, these writings can dispense with a conclusion, for they have an intrinsic value, and each page bears the impress of reality.  The critic who has to give his impressions of one of Borrow’s books is in much the same case as a critic who had to give his impressions in turn of the different parts of Gil Blas as they successively appeared.  The work is incomplete, but each several part is excellent and can be appreciated by itself.  Borrow has resuscitated a literary form which had been many years abandoned, and he has resuscitated it in no artificial manner—­as