It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a single point in which Borrow resembled any other writing man of his time; indeed, we cannot, at the moment, recall any really important writer of any period whose eccentricity of character can be compared with his. At the basis of the artistic temperament is generally that “sweet reasonableness” the lack of which we excuse in Borrow and in almost no one else. As to literary whim, it must not be supposed that this quality is necessarily and always the outcome of temperament. There are some authors of whom it may be said that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their “literary mood,” a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born of temperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect. Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim (not excluding Rabelais), passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which, as “Yorick,” he tried to live up to in his private life—tried in vain. With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, no doubt, was whimsical enough, and yet how many rich and rare passages in his writings are informed by a whim of a purely intellectual kind—a whim which could only have sprung from that delicious literary mood of his, engendered by much study of quaint old writers, into which he passed when at his desk! But whatsoever is whimsical, whatsoever is eccentric and angular, in Borrow’s writings is the natural, the inevitable growth of a nature more whimsical, more eccentric, more angular still. That such a man should have had an extraordinary life-experience was to be expected. And an extraordinary life-experience Borrow’s was, to be sure! This alone would lend an especial interest to Borrow’s biography—the fact, we mean, of his life having been extraordinary. For in these days no lives, as a rule, are less adventurous, none, as a rule, less tinged with romance, than the lives of those who attain eminence in the world of letters. No doubt they nowadays move about from place to place a good deal; not a few of them may even be called travellers, or at least globe-trotters; but, alas! in globe-trotting who shall hope to meet with adventures of a more romantic kind than those connected with a railway collision or a storm at sea? And this was so in days that preceded ours. It was so with Scott, it was so with Dickens, it was so with even Dumas, who, chained to his desk for months and months at a stretch, could only be seen by his friends during the intervals of work. Nay, even with regard to the writing men of the far past, the more time a man gave to literary production the less time he had to drink the rich wine of life, to see the world, to study nature and nature’s enigma man.