There is one special side of this doctrine of Providence which must be referred to specially, because Borrow himself calls attention to it in the curious commentary which he annexed to "The Romany Rye"; the doctrine so familiar to the last generation in the poems of Browning, that trouble, to which "man is born, as the sparks fly upward," is ordained by the Creator as a stimulus to endeavour, because "where least man suffers, longest he remains." Some of you may remember that he argues in that appendix that the old man who had learnt Chinese to distract his mind would have played but a sluggard's part in life if no affliction had befallen him, since he had never taken the pains to learn how to tell the time from a clock. "Nothing but extreme agony," says Borrow, "could have induced such a man to do anything useful." And every one will recall the passage in "Lavengro" where he speaks of the fit of horrors that attacked his hero, may we not say himself, when recovering from an illness. "In the recollection and prospect of such woe," he asks, "Is it not lawful to exclaim, 'Better that I had never been born'"? And he replies, "Fool, for thyself thou wast not born, but to fulfil the inscrutable decrees of thy Creator; and how dost thou know that this dark principle is not, after all, thy best friend; that it is not that which tempers the whole mass of thy corruption? It may be, for what thou knowest, the mother of wisdom and of great works, it is the dread of the horror of the night that makes the pilgrim hasten on his way. When thou feelest it nigh, let thy safety word be 'Onward!' If thou tarry, thou art overwhelmed. Courage! Build great works; 'tis urging thee." In the passage just quoted Borrow speaks of God's "inscrutable" decrees. After sitting as a young man at the feet of William Taylor and learning from him some philosophy and much scepticism, he had come back to the old Hebrew idea that in religion reverence was the beginning of wisdom. This did not mean that he had discarded Western science, or put a bridle upon his own insatiable curiosity. No man was more ready to learn what could anyhow or anywhere be learned. It meant that when all had been learned that science could teach, the really vital questions remained still without an answer, because natural science can throw no light on what nature itself really is. The only clue within our reach to that first and last problem lay, in his judgment, with the simple-hearted and lowly- minded, those in whom this wonderful world still aroused wonder. In thus calling to the soul of man not to lose its power of wonder, Borrow is in sympathy with the deepest thought of our time.