[Picture: George Borrow. Painted by John T. Borrow, a pupil of Old Crome] _Section IV_. (1840-81)--OULTON--AUTHORSHIP--BORROW'S APPEARANCE AND LEADING CHARACTERISTICS--TWILIGHT, AND THE END. Our Ulysses had now found a haven of refuge, and a permanent Calypso who worthily held his heart to the end. Oulton Cottage, with its banded firs and solemn solitary lake, alive with wild fowl, was an ideal place for Borrow. He had, in his early days, loved Norwich well, and might have settled here but for what Harriet Martineau styles the shout of laughter from all who remembered the old Norwich days, when he appeared "as a devout agent of the Bible Society." It is unquestionable that the jog-trot "daily-round-and-common-task" citizens of Norwich looked askance at him as a sort of _lusus naturae_, what naturalists call a "sport"--not in the slangy sense. Mr. Egmont Hake ("Macmillan's Magazine," 1882, Vol. XLV.) went so far as to say that Borrow was "perhaps the handsomest man of his day." On the other hand, Caroline Fox, the Quakeress, who called on Borrow in October, 1843, described him as "a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation." It was on April 11th, 1843, that Sir Robert Peel pronounced his striking eulogy on "The Bible in Spain." Any appreciation of Borrow's works is out of the question in this outline survey. He professed a great liking for his "Lives and Trials"--how full were the Lives "of wild and racy adventures, and in what racy, genuine language they were told." These words are closely applicable to Borrow's own writings; many of the critics fell foul of them, though Lockhart said Borrow had "a true eye for the picturesque, and a fund of real racy humour," while Elwin, fourteen years later (1857), praised his descriptions "as accurate as they are picturesque. They abound in dramatic and delicate strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the worse than Irish bogs of Polemical Protestantism." Mr. Saintsbury, one of our foremost literary essayists, while asserting, in 1886, that Borrow was not a popular author, stated that "his works greatly influenced Longfellow and Merimee, especially the latter." Blackwood naturally disliked Borrow, said gypsies constituted nine-tenths of his stock-in-trade, and that his chief credential to London was a letter from "an eccentric German teacher"! To-day where will you find a competent scholarly critic who is not a whole-hearted admirer of Borrow's style?