This last result at least was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked footprint on the sand. The 'great unknown' had gone down beneath his associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large extent revealed _himself_--a primitive man, with his breast by no means wholly rid of the instincts of the wild beast, grappling with the problem of a complex humanity: an epitome of the eternal struggle which alone gives savour to the wearisome process of "civilisation." For the conventional man of the lapidary phrase and the pious memoir (corrected by the maiden sister and the family divine), Borrow dared to substitute the _genus homo_ of natural history. Perhaps it was only to be expected that, like the discoveries of another Du Chaillu, his revelations should be received with a howl of incredulity. Almost alone, as far as we can discover, among the critics of the day Emile Montegut realised _to the full_ the true greatness, the originality, the abiding quality and interest of Borrow's work. Writing in September 1857 upon "Le Gentilhomme Bohemien" (an essay which appears in his _Ecrivains Modernes de l'Angleterre_, between studies on "Mistress Browning" and Alfred Tennyson), Montegut remarks of Borrow's "humoristic Odyssey":-- "Unfinished and fragmentary, these writings can dispense with a conclusion, for they have an intrinsic value, and each page bears the impress of reality. The critic who has to give his impressions of one of Borrow's books is in much the same case as a critic who had to give his impressions in turn of the different parts of _Gil Blas_ as they successively appeared. The work is incomplete, but each several part is excellent and can be appreciated by itself. Borrow has resuscitated a literary form which had been many years abandoned, and he has resuscitated it in no artificial manner--as a rhythmical form is rehabilitated, or as a dilettante re-establishes for a moment the vogue of the roundel or the virelay--but quite naturally as the inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the _novela picaresca_.