By style, in the generation of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Dickens and George Eliot, was implied something recondite--a wealth of metaphor, imagery, allusion, colour and perfume--a palette, a pounce-box, an optical instrument, a sounding-board, a musical box, anything rather than a living tongue.

To a later race of stylists, who have gone as far as Samoa and beyond in the quest of exotic perfumery, Borrow would have said simply, in the words of old Montaigne, "To smell, though well, is to stink,"-- "Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere." Borrow, in fact, by a right instinct went back to the straightforward manner of Swift and Defoe, Smollett and Cobbett, whose vigorous prose he specially admired; and he found his choice ill appreciated by critics whose sense of style demanded that a clear glass window should be studded with bull's-eyes.

To his distinctions of being a poet well-nigh incapable of verse, and a humourist with marvellously little pathos, Borrow thus added one which we are inclined to regard as the greatest of all--that of being a great nineteenth-century prose-writer without a style.
Though he did not elaborate, or strive to attain to the cultism or polite style of contemporary genius, Borrow seems to have written with some difficulty (or at any rate a lack of facility), and, impervious as he was to criticism, he retained in his prose a number of small faults that he might easily have got rid of.

His manner of introducing his generalities and conclusions is often either superfluous, or lame and clumsy.

Despite his natural eloquence, his fondness for the apostrophe is excessive; he preserved an irritating habit of parading such words as _eclat_, _penchant_ and _monticle_, and persisted in saying "of a verity," and using the word "individual" in the sense of person.