As an author, again, Borrow was as jealous as one of Thackeray's heroines; he could hardly bear to hear a contemporary book praised.

Whim, if you will, but scarcely an example of literary eccentricity.
Borrow developed a delightful faculty for adventure upon the high road, but such a faculty was far less singular than his gift--akin to the greatest painter's power of suggesting atmosphere--of investing each scene and incident with a separate and distinct air of uncompromising reality.

Many persons may have had the advantage of hearing conversation as brilliant or as wise as that of the dinner at Dilly's: what is distinctive of genius is the power to convey the general feeling of the interlocutors, to suggest a dramatic effect, an artistic whole, as Boswell does, by the cumulative effect of infinitesimal factors.

The triumph in each case is one not of opportunities but of the subtlest literary sense.
Similarly, Borrow's fixed ideas had little that was really exceptional or peculiar about them.

His hatred of mumbo-jumbo and priestcraft was but a part of his steady love of freedom and sincerity.