Note {25} — INTRODUCTION.

Flunkeyism he called it, and thence deduced the pecuniary miseries of Scott’s later life. His depreciatory view was in part, too, I believe, an echo from his favourite Vidocq. Speaking of the gipsies in his chapter on “Les Careurs,” Vidocq calls them a species characterised and depicted with so little truth by the first romance-writer of our time. But Borrow certainly had a far deeper reason for his dislike of Scott. Under the specious pretence of deference for antiquity and respect for primitive models, he imagined that Scott was sapping the foundations of Protestantism. Newman from the opposite camp saw only the beneficial effect of Scott’s influence in turning men’s minds in the direction of the Middle Ages. (See his article in the British Critic for April 1839, and Apologia, chap. iii.). As for Wordsworth, Borrow (with characteristic wrong-headedness) conceived him as an impostor. Had he made Nature his tent and the hard earth his bed with the stars for a canopy? No; he walked out to sing of moorland, and fell from a “highly eligible” cottage in the Lakes, where women-folk, at his beck and call, bore the brunt of the “plain living.”