in fact "the best book about Wales ever published."

Certainly no later book which could be compared with it has been as good,
or nearly as good. As for its predecessors, the "Itinerary" and the
"Description" of Gerald of Wales, even setting aside the charm of
antiquity, make a book that is equal to "Wild Wales" for originality,
vivacity and truth. Of the antiquarian and picturesque travellers in the
late eighteenth century and early nineteenth none wrote anything that is
valuable except for some facts and some evidence of taste. Borrow
himself probably knew few or none of them, though he mentions Gerald.
There is no evidence that he knew the great nineteenth-century
collections of Welsh manuscripts and translations. He says nothing of
the "Mabinogion." He had apparently never heard of the pedestrian Iolo
Morganwg. He perhaps never saw Stephens' "Literature of the Kymry." His
knowledge was picked up anyhow and anywhere from Welsh texts and Lhuyd's
"Archaeologia," without system and with very little friendly discussion
or comparison. Wales, therefore, was to him as wonderful as Spain, and
equally uncharted. What he saw did not spoil the visionary image, and
his enthusiasm coupled with curiosity gives the book of his travels just
the continuous impulse which he never found for his Cornish, Manx, Irish
or Scottish notes. He was able to fill the book with sympathetic
observation and genial self-revelation.

The book is of course a tourist's book. Borrow went through the country
as a gentleman, running no risks, and having scarcely an object except to
see what was to be seen and to please himself. He got, as he probably
counted on getting, the consideration due to a gentleman who can pay his
way and meets only the humbler sort of people, publicans, farmers,
drovers, labourers, sextons, parish clerks, and men upon the road. He
seldom stayed more than a night or an hour or two anywhere. His