straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose
vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his choice ill
appreciated by critics whose sense of style demanded that a clear glass
window should be studded with bull's-eyes. To his distinctions of being
a poet well-nigh incapable of verse, and a humourist with marvellously
little pathos, Borrow thus added one which we are inclined to regard as
the greatest of all--that of being a great nineteenth-century
prose-writer without a style.

Though he did not elaborate, or strive to attain to the cultism or polite
style of contemporary genius, Borrow seems to have written with some
difficulty (or at any rate a lack of facility), and, impervious as he was
to criticism, he retained in his prose a number of small faults that he
might easily have got rid of. His manner of introducing his generalities
and conclusions is often either superfluous, or lame and clumsy. Despite
his natural eloquence, his fondness for the apostrophe is excessive; he
preserved an irritating habit of parading such words as _eclat_,
_penchant_ and _monticle_, and persisted in saying "of a verity," and
using the word "individual" in the sense of person. Such blemishes are
microscopic enough. It was not such trifles as these that proved
stumbling-blocks to the "men of blood and foam," as he called his
critics.

Of the generality of the critics of that day it would probably be well
within the mark to aver that their equipment was more solid, and their
competence more assured than that of their successors; {30} it would be
safe to assert that their self-sufficiency was also decidedly more
pronounced. Now for reasons which we have endeavoured to explain, the
equanimity of the critical reviewers was considerably ruffled by
_Lavengro_. Perplexed by its calling itself an autobiography, they were