There's one part of London where all the Irish live--at least the worst of them--and there they hatch their villainies to speak this tongue.' And Borrow followed his father's prejudices throughout his life, although in the one happy year in which he wrote _The Bible in Spain_ he was able to do justice to the country that had inspired so much of his work: Honour to Ireland and her 'hundred thousand welcomes'! Her fields have long been the greenest in the world; her daughters the fairest; her sons the bravest and most eloquent.

May they never cease to be so.[31] In later years Orangemen were to him the only attractive element in the life of Ireland, and we may be sure that he was not displeased when his stepdaughter married one of them.

Yet the creator of literature works more wisely than he knows, and Borrow's books have won the wise and benign appreciation of many an Irish and Roman Catholic reader, whose nationality and religion Borrow would have anathematised.

Irishmen may forgive Borrow much, because he was one of the first of modern English writers to take their language seriously.[32] It is true that he had but the most superficial knowledge of it.

He admits--in _Wild Wales_--that he only knew it 'by ear.' The abundant Irish literature that has been so diligently studied during the last quarter of a century was a closed book to Borrow, whose few translations from the Irish have but little value.