And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pen could describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to draw them. This was the humour of Borrow. His command of facial expression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily and unconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm. Once, when he was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—_The London Magazine_ set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and infamous Griffiths Wainewright. {32} In a moment Borrow’s face changed: his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said, “Wainewright! He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and _smile_ all the evening like _this_.” He made me see Wainewright and hear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in the publishers’ parlour. His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle, his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect of this kind of eccentric humour. “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’s only duncie books that sell nowadays,” he would shout when some new “immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned. Tennyson, I fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was not the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although, according to Leland, {33} the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural, perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less “duncie.” As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers,” his critics, he in ‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given “zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody in England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is the accusative form.