O young reader, whoever thou art, or reader at least who has been young, canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou hast come back from that hard, stern world, which opens on thee when thou puttest thy foot out of the threshold of home, come back to the four quiet walls, wherein thine elders sit in peace, and seen with a sort of sad amaze how calm and undisturbed all is there? That generation which has gone before thee in the path of passion, the generation of thy parents (not so many years, perchance, remote from thine own), how immovably far off, in its still repose, it seems from thy turbulent youth. It has in it a stillness as of a classic age, antique as the statues of the Greeks, that tranquil monotony of routine into which those lives that preceded thee have merged, the occupations that they have found sufficing for their happiness by the fireside--in the arm-chair and corner appropriated to each--how strangely they contrast thy own feverish excitement! And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and then resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened! Nothing had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world seems to have shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And you sit down, crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no more, and smile mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one, you say nothing till the time comes for bed, and you take up your candle, and creep miserably to your lonely room. This is not the eloquence of Borrow, though the thought might have been his; it may not be in that grand style of which we hear so much and read so little, but--and this is the substance of the matter--it is interesting, it is moving, and worth pages of choppy dialogue. You read it, first of all, it may be in your youth, when your heart burnt within you as you wondered what was going to happen, but you can return to it in sober age and read it over again with a smile it has taken a lifetime to manufacture. And then Miss Bronte's books! what rhetoric is there! And _Eothen_! Why has not _Eothen_ gone the way of all other traces of Eastern travel? It has humour--delightful humour, no doubt, but it is its eloquence, that picture of the burning, beating sun following the traveller by day, which keeps _Eothen_ alive. Borrow's eloquence is splendid, manly, and desperately courageous. What an apostrophe is that to old Crome at the end of the twenty-first chapter! _Lavengro_ is full of riches. As for his courage, who else could begin a passage 'O England,' and emerge triumphantly a page and a half lower down as Borrow does in _The Bible in Spain_?