{37} We know something about the dim retreating Arcady from Dr.Jessopp, we know something of the old farmers and tranters and woodlanders from Hardy, something of late Georgian London from Dickens, something of the old Lancashire mill-hands from Mrs.
Gaskell, and something of provincial town-life in the forties and fifties from George Eliot.

It has fallen to Borrow to hold up the mirror to wild Nature on the roadside and the heath.
"The personages in these inimitable books are not merely snap-shots, they are living pictures; and, more than that, the people are moving about amid fluttering leaves and flickering sunlight and waves of shadow and rippling brooks.

One neither misses the colours of the landscapes nor the very sounds of the voices.

Moreover, the characters, though we feel that they have never come within the range of our experience, yet did actually live and move and talk as they are represented; and we know, too, that such characters have passed away from our earth--improved off the face of it.

And we regret, in spite of ourselves, that these gypsies are gone.