scoundrel, every sycophantic lacquey, and every political and religious
renegade in the kingdom. His fury was that of an angry bull tormented by
a swarm of gnats. His worst passions were aroused; his most violent
prejudices confirmed. His literary zeal, never extremely alert, was
sensibly diminished.

This last result at least was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end
had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through
the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked
footprint on the sand. The 'great unknown' had gone down beneath his
associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large
extent revealed _himself_--a primitive man, with his breast by no means
wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem
of a complex humanity: an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone
gives savour to the wearisome process of "civilisation." For the
conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected
by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute
the _genus homo_ of natural history. Perhaps it was only to be expected
that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should
be received with a howl of incredulity.

Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day
Emile Montegut realised _to the full_ the true greatness, the
originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow's work. Writing
in September 1857 upon "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears
in his _Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre_, between studies on "Mistress
Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic
Odyssey":--

"Unfinished and fragmentary, these writings can dispense with a