Dr. Hake predicted that they would. {37} We know something about the dim
retreating Arcady from Dr. Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers
and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian
London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs.
Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties
from George Eliot. It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild
Nature on the roadside and the heath.

"The personages in these inimitable books are not merely snap-shots,
they are living pictures; and, more than that, the people are moving
about amid fluttering leaves and flickering sunlight and waves of
shadow and rippling brooks. One neither misses the colours of the
landscapes nor the very sounds of the voices. Moreover, the
characters, though we feel that they have never come within the range
of our experience, yet did actually live and move and talk as they are
represented; and we know, too, that such characters have passed away
from our earth--improved off the face of it. And we regret, in spite
of ourselves, that these gypsies are gone. The rogues will never come
back! A feeling of disappointment is apt to come over us as we read,
and we are ready to stop and ask angrily, 'Why can't we drop in among
the tents, and see an Ursula or a Pakomovna, and have our fortunes
told as of yore?' And we know that it cannot be, and that the Romany
Rye is a being who lived and moved in a different age from ours, as
different as the age of Hector and Achilles, when warriors fought in
their chariots round the walls of Troy, and the long-haired Achaians
hurled their spears and stole one another's horses in the darkness,
and kings made long speeches armed to the teeth, and ran away with
other kings' wives or multiplied their own. We go on to confess to
ourselves that we must be content with hearing about all the strange
experience of the Romany Rye at second-hand, and since it must be so,