otherwise: his portrait is the creation of Borrow's most studied hatred.
Yet it must be admitted that the man in black is a triumph of complex
characterisation. A joyous liver and an unscrupulous libertine,
sceptical as Voltaire, as atheistic as a German professor, as practical
as a Jew banker, as subtle as a Jesuit, he has as many ways of converting
the folks among whom he is thrown as Panurge had of eating the corn in
ear. For the simple and credulous--crosses and beads; for the
hard-hearted and venal--material considerations; for the cultured and
educated--a fine tissue of epigrams and anthropology; for the
ladies--flattery and badinage. A spiritual ancestor of Anatole France's
marvellous full-length figure of Jerome Coignard, Borrow's conception
takes us back first to Rabelais and secondly to the seventeenth-century
conviction of the profound Machiavellism of Jesuitry.

The man in black and Jasper are great, but the master attraction of the
region that we are to traverse is admittedly Isopel Berners. It will
perhaps be observed that our heroine makes her appearance on the stage
rather more in the fashion of Molly Seagrim than of that other engaging
Amazon of romance, Diana Vernon, whose "long hair streaming in the wind"
forms one single point of resemblance to our fair Isopel. In other
respects, certainly no two heroines could be more dissimilar. Unaided
even by the slightest assistance from the graphic arts, the difficulty of
picturing the lineaments of this muscular beauty, as she first burst on
the sight of our autobiographer upon the declivity of the dingle, may be
freely confessed, ere an attempt is made to describe her. We know,
however, on the testimony of a sincere admirer, that she was over six
feet high, with loose-flowing, flaxen hair; that she wore a tight bodice
and a skirt of blue, to match the colour of her eyes; and that eighteen
summers had passed over her head since she first saw the light in the
great house of Long Melford, a nursery in which she learnt to fear God