The personal element in the book—­so suggestive of mystery and romance—­excited the strongest curiosity.  Apart from this, however, the reading public of 1843 were not unnaturally startled by a book which seemed to profess to be a good, serious, missionary work, but for which it was manifest that Gil Blas and not Bishop Heber had been taken as a model.  Not that any single comparison of the kind can convey the least idea of the complex idiosyncrasy of such a work.  There is a substratum of Guide Book and Gil Blas, no doubt, but there are unmistakable streaks of Defoe, of Dumas, and of Dickens, with all his native prejudices and insular predilections strong upon him.  A narrative so wide awake amidst a vagrant population of questionable morals and alien race suggests an affinity with Hajji Baba (a close kinsman, we conceive, of the Borrovian picaro).  But, above all, as one follows the author through the mazes of his book, one is conscious of two strangely assorted figures, never far from the itinerant’s side, and always ready to improve the occasion if a shadow of an opportunity be afforded.  One, who is prolific of philological chippings, might be compared to a semblance of Max Muller; while the other, alternately denouncing the wickedness and deriding the toothlessness of a grim Giant Pope, may be likened, at a distance, to John Bunyan.  About the whole—­to conclude—­is an atmosphere, not too pronounced, of the Newgate Calendar, and a few patches of sawdust from the Prize Ring.  May not people well have wondered (the good pious English folk to whom Luck is a scandal, as the Bible Society’s secretary wrote to Borrow),—­what manner of man is this, this muleteer-missionary, this natural man with a pen in the hand of a prize-fighter, but of a prize-fighter who is afflicted with the fads of a philologer—­and a pedant at that?  The surprise may be compared to what that of a previous generation would have been, had it seen Johnson and Boswell and Baretti all fused into one man.  The incongruity is heightened by familiarity with Borrow’s tall, blonde, Scandinavian figure, and the reader is reminded of those roving Northmen of the days of simple mediaeval devotion, who were wont to signalise their conversion from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and a pious pilgrimage.

That Curiosity exaggerated and was a marvel-monger we shall attempt to demonstrate.  But, in the meantime, it was there, and it was very strong.  As for Borrow, he was prepared to derive stimulus from it just as long as it maintained the unquestioning attitude of Jasper Petulengro when he expressed the sentiments of gipsydom in the well-worn “Lor’, brother, how learned you are!”