coppice, the view from the crest, the twinkling lights at nightfall from the sheltering inn.  Traceable in a long line of our most cherished writers, from Chaucer and Lithgow and Nash, Defoe and Fielding, and Hazlitt and Holcroft, the fascination of the road that these writers have tried to communicate, has never perhaps been expressed with a nicer discernment than in the Confessions of Rousseau, that inveterate pedestrian who walked Europe to the rhythm of ideas as epoch-making as any that have ever emanated from the mind of man.

“La chose que je regrette le plus” (writes Rousseau) “dans les details de ma vie dont j’ai perdu la memoire, est de n’avoir pas fait des journaux de mes voyages.  Jamais je n’ai tant pense, tant existe, tant vecu, tant ete moi, si j’ose ainsi dire, que dans ceux que j’ai faits seul et a pied.  La marche a quelque chose qui anime et avive mes idees:  je ne puis presque penser quand je reste en place; il faut que mon corps soit en branle pour y mettre mon esprit.  La vue de la campagne, la succession des aspects agreables, le grand air, le grand appetit, la bonne sante que je gagne en marchant, la liberte du cabaret, l’eloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dependance, de tout ce qui me rappelle a ma situation:  tout cela degage mon ame.”

It is a possession in a rare degree of this wonderful open-air quality as a writer that constrains us in our generation to condone any offences against the mint and anise and cummin decrees of literary infallibility that Borrow may have from time to time committed.  And when it is realised, in addition, what a unique knowledge he possessed of the daily life, the traditions, the folk-lore, and the dialects of the strange races of vagrants, forming such a picturesque element in the life of the road, the documentary value, as apart from the literary interest of Borrow’s work, becomes more and more manifest.

Lavengro is not a book, it is true, to open sesame to the first comer, or to yield up one tithe of its charm upon a first acquaintance.  Yet, in spite of the “foaming vipers,” as Borrow styles his critics, Lavengro’s roots have already struck deep into the soil of English literature, as Dr. Hake predicted that they would. {37} We know something about the dim retreating Arcady from Dr. Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs. Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties from George Eliot.  It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild Nature on the roadside and the heath.