Clement King Shorter

“ All I have said of Lavengro to yourself personally, or to others publicly or privately, I say again of The Romany Rye. Everywhere in it the hand of the master is stamped boldly and deeply. You join the chisel of Dante with the pencil of Defoe.
I am rejoiced to see so many works announced of yours, for you have more that is worth knowing to tell than any one I am acquainted with. For your coming progeny's sake I am disposed to wish you had worried the literary-craft less. Brand and score them never so much, they will not turn and repent, but only spit the more froth and venom. ”

“ That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill-temper and a tender heart, and a racking imagination, speaking from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of passionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater far than in the days when all his pain and love and remorse were still hidden from us all. ”

“ A single evening’s acquaintance does not suffice with me to form an opinion, it only leaves on my mind an impression. They impressed me, then, as pleasing in manners and appearance: Ellen’s is a character to which I could soon attach myself, and Fanny and Louisa have each their separate advantages. I can, however, read more in a face like Mrs. Williams’s than in the smooth young features of her daughters—time, trial, and exertion write a distinct hand, more legible than smile or dimple. ”

“ Yes, there was plenty to do and to see in Norwich, and Borrow's memories of it were nearly always kindly:
A fine old city, truly, is that, view it from whatever side you will; but it shows best from the east, where ground, bold and [Pg 83] elevated, overlooks the fair and fertile valley in which it stands. Gazing from those heights, the eye beholds a scene which cannot fail to awaken, even in the least sensitive bosom, feelings of pleasure and admiration. ”

“ But The Zincali is too confused, too ill-arranged a book to rank with Borrow’s four great works. There are passages in it, indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow’s writings can afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could have written had he not been obsessed by the “science” of his subject. His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in Lavengro and The Romany Rye. For Borrow was not a man of science—a philologist, a folk-lorist of the first order. ”

“ The critic is as much to blame as the reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to come between the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best in literature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It is easy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the critic to tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, to Tennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded little attention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept on writing. Borrow was otherwise made. ”