This pride, magnificent as the loneliness of kings, and about as
unproductive of a sympathetic view of life, always constituted a
barrier in the way of Borrow's success. There were innumerable other
obstacles: his choice of friends, his fierce denunciatory hatred of
gentility, together with humbug, which he always seemed to confuse
with it, the attacks of the "Horrors," his grave bearing, which no
laugh ever disturbed, and, above all, his uncompromising hostility to
the things that the world chose to consider excellent. The world in
return could make nothing of a man who was a mass of moods and
sensibilities, strange tastes and pursuits. It is not remarkable
that he should fail to make the stir that he had hoped to make.

With the unerring instinct of a hypersensitive nature, he knew his
merit, his honesty, his capacity--knew that he possessed one thing
that eventually commands success, which "through life has ever been
of incalculable utility to me, and has not unfrequently supplied the
place of friends, money, and many other things of almost equal
importance--iron perseverance, without which all the advantages of
time and circumstance are of very little avail in any undertaking."
{91b} It was this dogged determination that was to carry him through
the most critical period of his life, enable him to earn the approval
of those in whose interests he worked, and eventually achieve fame
and an unassailable place in English literature.



CHAPTER VI: JANUARY-JULY 1833