But innumerable are the possible styles which combine something from the Bible, Defoe, and Sterne, with something else upon a Victorian foundation. Borrow's something else, which dominates and welds the rest, is the most important. It expresses the man, or rather it allows the man's qualities to appear, his melancholy, his independence, his curiosity, his love of strong men and horses. Of little felicities there are very few. It has gusto always at command, and mystery also. We feel in it a kind of reality not often associated with professional literature, but rather with the letters of men who are not writers and with the speech of illiterate men of character. The great difference between them and Borrow is that their speech can rarely be represented in print except by another genius, and that their letters only now and then reach the level which Borrow continues at and often rises above. Yet he has something in common with such men--for example, in his feeling for Nature. In Spain, it is true, he gave way to declamatory descriptions of grandeur and desolation: in England, where he saw nothing of the kind, he wrote little description, and the impression of the country through which he is passing is that of an inarticulate outdoor man, strong and sincere but vague. Here, again, he has something in common with the eighteenth- century man, who liked the country, but would probably agree that one green field was like another. He writes like the man who desired a gentle wife, an Arabic book, the haunch of a buck, and Madeira old. He reminds us of an even older or simpler type when he apostrophises the retired pugilist: "'Tis a treat to see thee, Tom of Bedford, in thy 'public' in Holborn way, whither thou hast retired with thy well-earned bays. 'Tis Friday night, and nine by Holborn clock. There sits the yeoman at the end of his long room, surrounded by his friends: glasses are filled, and a song is the cry, and a song is sung well suited to the place; it finds an echo in every heart--fists are clenched, arms are waved, and the portraits of the mightly fighting men of yore, Broughton, and Slack, and Ben, which adorn the walls, appear to smile grim approbation, whilst many a manly voice joins in the bold chorus: 'Here's a health to old honest John Bull, When he's gone we shan't find such another, And with hearts and with glasses brim full, We will drink to old England, his mother.'" There is little doubt of the immortality of this good old style, and it testifies to the full heart and perhaps the full glass also of George Borrow; but it was not this passage in particular that made Whitwell Elwin call his writing "almost affectedly simple." {picture: Ned Turner, Tom Cribb: page253.jpg} CHAPTER XXVII--BORROW AND LOW LIFE