I have not forgotten the Man in Black, though I gladly would. Not that I am any more in sympathy with his theology than Borrow's, if it is more interesting and venerable. But in this priest, Borrow's method, always instinctively intense if not exaggerated, falls to caricature. I have no objection to caricature; when it is of a logical or incidental kind I enjoy it, even in "The Romany Rye"; I enjoy, for example, the snoring Wordsworthian, without any prejudice against Wordsworth. "The Catholic Times" as late as 1900 was still angry with Borrow's "crass anti-Catholic bigotry." I should have expected them to laugh consumedly at a priest, a parson and a publican who deserve places in the same gallery with wicked earls and noble savages of popular fiction. It may be true that this "creation of Borrow's most studied hatred" is, as Mr. Seccombe says, {242} "a triumph of complex characterisation." He is "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."