and that odious wretch the London publisher? You had need to be a deaf mute to avoid taking part in a conversation like this. Who was Mary Fulcher? All the clocks in the parish will have struck midnight before that question has been answered. It is not to take a gloomy view of the world to say that there are few pleasanter things in it than a good talk about George Borrow. For invalids and delicate persons leading retired lives, there are no books like Borrow's. Lassitude and Languor, horrid hags, simply pick up their trailing skirts and scuttle out of any room into which he enters. They cannot abide him. A single chapter of Borrow is air and exercise; and, indeed, the exercise is not always gentle. 'I feel,' said an invalid, laying down _The Bible in Spain_, as she spoke, upon the counterpane, 'as if I had been gesticulating violently for the space of two hours.' She then sank into deep sleep, and is now hale and hearty. Miss Martineau, in her _Life in the Sick Room_, invokes a blessing upon the head of Christopher North. But there were always those who refused to believe in Miss Martineau's illness, and certainly her avowed preference for the man whom Macaulay in his wrath, writing to Napier in Edinburgh, called 'your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing Professor of Moral Philosophy,' is calculated to give countenance to this unworthy suspicion. It was an odd taste for an invalid who, whilst craving for vigour, must necessarily hate noise. Borrow is a vigorous writer, Wilson a noisy one. It was, however, his _Recreations_ and not the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, that Miss Martineau affected. Still the _Recreations_ are noisy too, and Miss Martineau must find her best excuse, and I am determined to find an excuse for her--for did she not write the _Feats on the Fiord_?--in the fact, that when she wrote her _Life in the Sick Room_ (a dear little book to read when in rude health), Borrow had published nothing of note. Had he done so, she would have been of my way of thinking.