In speaking of any one of Borrow’s books it is always necessary to say a good deal about Borrow as a man. Besides being the very child of Nature’s fantasy, he was the prince of literary egotists. Everything in human life and everything in nature upon which he looked was enveloped in a coloured atmosphere shed by the eccentric ego. That his love of Wales was genuine there can be no doubt whatever. For this there was perhaps a very special reason—a reason quite unrecognized by himself. I have somewhere—but I forget where—remarked upon a curious and common mistake in regard to Borrow—I mean the mistake of speaking of him as an East Anglian. Very gratifying was this mistake to Borrow himself. When walking with me in Richmond Park, or elsewhere, he would frequently stop, look round and murmur, “Beautiful England!” and then begin to declare eloquently that there was not in the world a country to be compared with it, and that the race which lived in this beloved land was equally incomparable in most things, especially in what he valued so much—athleticism in all its forms. This was merely because England was his place of birth. Born in East Anglia he was, to be sure; but Dr. Johnson long ago held to the opinion that a man born in a stable need not necessarily be described as a horse. When a man’s father is pure Cornish (Celtic) and when his mother is mainly French, the fact of his having been born in Norfolk is not enough to make him an East Anglian. By an accident the regiment to which his father belonged was located in Norfolk at the time of his birth, just as by an accident it might have been located in Ireland or Scotland. In either of these cases he would have been George Borrow the Celt, or rather, George Borrow the Unique, but not a Scotsman—not an Irishman. It is the blood in a man’s veins, it is not the spot in which he is born, that decides the question of his race. Does one call the daughters of the Irishman, Patrick Bronte, who were Celtic to the marrow, Yorkshire girls because they were born at Thornton? Does one call Mr. Swinburne a Londoner because he, a Northumbrian by a long line of ancestors, chanced to be born within a stone’s-throw of Belgrave Square? Does one call the Rossettis Londoners, because it was in London, and not in Italy, that they were born? To imagine any man more Celtic than Borrow is impossible. Not a single East Anglian characteristic exhibited by him do I remember—except perhaps his Norfolk accent, and his very worthy and exemplary passion for “boiled leg of mutton with turnips and caper sauce,” which he pronounced to be “food for the gods.” It was his own way of writing and talking about himself, however, that fostered if it did not originate the conception that Borrow was an East Anglian. There is no more unreasonable, as there is no more winsome, trait in human nature than the form of egotism which I will call provincial patriotism—a quality of which Borrow was so full. No matter