Borrow’s descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply charged with the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy a more matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he is anything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or so trustworthy. But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was, before everything else, a poet. If this statement should be challenged by “the present time,” let me tell the present time that by poet I do not mean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and that kind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeing through “the shows of things” and knowing where he is—the gift of drinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Nature for so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffable pathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live, having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and for companions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women. In this sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his love of adventure, very high among poets—as high, perhaps, as I place another dweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, “the well-known and popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, like Borrow, is famous for “his great knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record,” and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accent of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel. “Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!” That is what Borrow did; and how few there are that understand it.