Through the Magic Door by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow-from one pole of / the human character to the other-and yet they are in contact on the / shelf of my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I think, / about the land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out into the / ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things, and has held / them there in isolation until they have woven themselves into the / texture of the Cornish race. What is this strange strain which lurks / down yonder and every now and then throws up a great man with singular / un-English ways and features for all the world to marvel at? It is not / Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further and deeper lie the / springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving men of Tyre, with / noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations, who have in far-off / days forgotten their blue Mediterranean and settled on the granite / shores of the Northern Sea?

Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry Irving? / How strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know that his / mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination / of the Brontes-so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their / predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. / Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle / head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a / king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange / mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once more, his / father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is something strange, and weird, / and great, lurking down yonder in the great peninsula which juts into / the western sea. Borrow may, if he so pleases, call himself an East / Anglian-"an English Englishman," as he loved to term it-but is it a / coincidence that the one East Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one / who showed these strange qualities? The birth was accidental. The / qualities throw back to the twilight of the world.