He has rediscovered the picaresque method, as it were instinctively, by the mere fact of his having to express sentiments of a certain description; he has indeed rediscovered it by the same process which led Cervantes and Hurtado de Mendoza to invent it--by virtue of that necessity which always enables genius to give the most appropriate clothing to its conceptions.

To attain this result, however, it is necessary that genius should not be thrown off its balance by deliberate ambition, or too much preoccupied by the immediate desire to succeed.

By his conformity to all these conditions, Borrow has become, without giving a thought to such purpose, the Quevedo and the Mendoza of modern England." Beyond all this there is quite another and perhaps an even more potent reason why the critics of a later generation have felt constrained to place this work of Borrow's upon a higher pedestal than their predecessors did.
As within the four angles of a painting there is nothing more difficult to confine than sunlight and atmosphere, so in literature is it a task of the highest achievement to compass the wind on the heath, the sunshine and the rain.

We know the dark background, the mystery and the awe of the forest, how powerfully they are suggested to us by some old writers and some modern ones, such as Spenser and Fouque, by the author of _The Pathfinder_ and Thoreau; the scent of the soil, once again, in rain and in shine, is it not conveyed to us with an astonishing distinctness, that is the product of a literary endowment of the rarest order, by such writers as Izaak Walton and Robert Burns, and among recent writers in varying degrees by Richard Jefferies and by Barnes, by T.E.Brown and Thomas Hardy?
And then there is the kindred touch, hardly if at all less rare, which evokes for us the camaraderie and blithe spirit of the highway: the winding road, the flashing stream, the bordering coppice, the view from the crest, the twinkling lights at nightfall from the sheltering inn.

Traceable in a long line of our most cherished writers, from Chaucer and Lithgow and Nash, Defoe and Fielding, and Hazlitt and Holcroft, the fascination of the road that these writers have tried to communicate, has never perhaps been expressed with a nicer discernment than in the _Confessions_ of Rousseau, that inveterate pedestrian who walked Europe to the rhythm of ideas as epoch-making as any that have ever emanated from the mind of man.
"La chose que je regrette le plus" (writes Rousseau) "dans les details de ma vie dont j'ai perdu la memoire, est de n'avoir pas fait des journaux de mes voyages.