We can frequently study an author with good effect through the medium of
his literary admirations; we have already noticed a few of Borrow's
predilections in real life. With regard to literature, his predilections
(or more particularly what Zola would call his _haines_) were fully as
protestant and as thorough. His indifference to the literature of his
own time might be termed brutal; his intellectual self-sufficiency was
worthy of a Macaulay or of a Donne. A fellow-denouncer of snobs, he made
Thackeray very uncomfortable by his contemptuous ignorance of _The Snob
Papers_, and even of the name of the periodical in which they were
appearing. Concerning Keats he once asked, "Have they not been trying to
resuscitate him?" When Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he
broke out: "For God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put
them or what to do with them." Scott's _Woodstock_ he picked up more
than once and incontinently threw down as "trashy." As a general rule he
judged a modern author by his prejudices. If these differed by a hair's
breadth from his own he damned the whole of his work. He had to his
credit a vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to be acquainted
with this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was
scarcely knowledge. He was not what one could fairly call unread in the
classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared himself
complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage. He had the
utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody else was
the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest abhorrence.
The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific in cases of
chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough sincerity of his
view than to any conscious subtlety of humour. He disliked Scott
especially for his easy tolerance of Jacobites and Papists, {25} while he
distrusted his portraits, those portraits of the rougher people which may
have frequently been over-praised by Scott's admirers. We most of us