attain this result, however, it is necessary that genius should not be
thrown off its balance by deliberate ambition, or too much preoccupied
by the immediate desire to succeed. By his conformity to all these
conditions, Borrow has become, without giving a thought to such
purpose, the Quevedo and the Mendoza of modern England."

Beyond all this there is quite another and perhaps an even more potent
reason why the critics of a later generation have felt constrained to
place this work of Borrow's upon a higher pedestal than their
predecessors did.

As within the four angles of a painting there is nothing more difficult
to confine than sunlight and atmosphere, so in literature is it a task of
the highest achievement to compass the wind on the heath, the sunshine
and the rain. We know the dark background, the mystery and the awe of
the forest, how powerfully they are suggested to us by some old writers
and some modern ones, such as Spenser and Fouque, by the author of _The
Pathfinder_ and Thoreau; the scent of the soil, once again, in rain and
in shine, is it not conveyed to us with an astonishing distinctness, that
is the product of a literary endowment of the rarest order, by such
writers as Izaak Walton and Robert Burns, and among recent writers in
varying degrees by Richard Jefferies and by Barnes, by T. E. Brown and
Thomas Hardy? And then there is the kindred touch, hardly if at all less
rare, which evokes for us the camaraderie and blithe spirit of the
highway: the winding road, the flashing stream, the bordering coppice,
the view from the crest, the twinkling lights at nightfall from the
sheltering inn. Traceable in a long line of our most cherished writers,
from Chaucer and Lithgow and Nash, Defoe and Fielding, and Hazlitt and
Holcroft, the fascination of the road that these writers have tried to
communicate, has never perhaps been expressed with a nicer discernment