Glanvill told of the poor Oxford scholar who went away with the Gypsies and learnt their "traditional kind of learning," and meant soon to leave them and give the world an account of what he had learned. Men like George Morland have lived for a time with Gypsies. Matthew Arnold elaborated Glanvill's tale in a sweet Oxford strain. All these things delight us. Some day we shall be pleased even with the Gypsy's carrion- eating and thieving, "those habits of the Gypsy, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian, and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach," which please Mr. W. H. Hudson "rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-Gypsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him." Borrow's Gypsies are wild and uncoddled and without sordidness, and will not soon be superseded. They are painted with a lively if ideal colouring, and they live only in his books. They will not be seen again until the day of Jefferies' wild England, "after London," shall come, and tents are pitched amidst the ruins of palaces that had displaced earlier tents. Borrow's England is the old England of Fielding, painted with more intensity because even as Borrow was travelling the change was far advanced, and when he was writing had been fulfilled. And now most people have to keep off the grass, except in remotest parts or in the neighbourhood of large towns where landowners are, to some extent, kept in their place. The rivers, the very roads, are not ours, as they were Borrow's. We go out to look for them still, and of those who adventure with caravan, tent, or knapsack, the majority must be consciously under Borrow's influence. Yet he was no mere lover and praiser of old times. His London in 1825 is more romantic than the later London of more deliberate romances: he found it romantic; he did not merely think it would be so if only we could see it. He loved the old and the wild too well to deface his feeling by more than an occasional comparison with the new and the refined, and these comparisons are not effective. He is best when he is without apparent design. As a rule if he has a design it is too obvious: he exaggerates, uses the old-fashioned trick of re-appearance and recognition, or breaks out into heavy eloquence of description or meditation. These things show up because he is the most "natural" of writers. His style is a modification of the style of his age, and is without the consistent personal quality of other vigorous men's, like Hazlitt or Cobbett. Perhaps English became a foreign language like his other thirty. Thus his books have no professional air, and they create without difficulty the illusion of reality. This lack of a literary manner, this appearance of writing like everybody else in his day, combines, with his character and habits, to endear him to a generation that has had its Pater and may find Stevenson too silky.