he had reason to fear might be held to disfigure the character of the
swilling and prize-fighting sections among his compatriots. {20a}

Borrow was a master of whim; but it is easy to exaggerate his
eccentricity. As a traveller who met with adventures upon the roads of
Britain he was surpassed by a dozen writers that could be named, and in
our own day--to mention one--by that truly eccentric being "The Druid."
{20b} The Druid had a special affinity with Borrow, in regard to his
kindness for an old applewoman. His applewoman kept a stall in the
Strand to which the Druid was a constant visitor, mainly for the purpose
of having a chat and borrowing and repaying small sums, rarely exceeding
one shilling. As an author, again, Borrow was as jealous as one of
Thackeray's heroines; he could hardly bear to hear a contemporary book
praised. Whim, if you will, but scarcely an example of literary
eccentricity.

Borrow developed a delightful faculty for adventure upon the high road,
but such a faculty was far less singular than his gift--akin to the
greatest painter's power of suggesting atmosphere--of investing each
scene and incident with a separate and distinct air of uncompromising
reality. Many persons may have had the advantage of hearing conversation
as brilliant or as wise as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is
distinctive of genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the
interlocutors, to suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as
Boswell does, by the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors. The
triumph in each case is one not of opportunities but of the subtlest
literary sense.

Similarly, Borrow's fixed ideas had little that was really exceptional or
peculiar about them. His hatred of mumbo-jumbo and priestcraft was but a