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!"

In February 1843 Borrow wrote to Murray that he had begun his _Life_--a
"kind of biography in the Robinson Crusoe style,"--and was determined
that it should surpass anything that he had already written. It had been
contemplated, he added, for some months already, as a possible sequel to