n Paris and Madrid. "I
have been everywhere," he said to the simple company at a Welsh inn.
Speaking to Colonel Napier in 1839 at Seville, he said that he had picked
up the Gypsy tongue "some years ago in Moultan," and he gave the
impression that he had visited most parts of the East.

A little too much has been made of this "veiled period," not by Borrow,
but by others. It would have been fair to surmise that if he chose not
to write about this period of his life, either there was very little in
it, or there was something in it which he was unwilling--perhaps
ashamed--to disclose; and what has been discovered suggests that he was
in an unsettled state--writing to please himself and perhaps also the
booksellers, travelling a little and perhaps meeting some of the
adventures which he crammed into those few months of 1825, suffering from
"the horrors" either in solitude or with no confidant but his mother.

Borrow himself took no great pains to preserve the veil. For instance,
in the preface to his translation of "Y Bardd Cwsg" in 1860, he says that
it was made "in the year 1830 at the request of a little Welsh bookseller
of his acquaintance" in Smithfield.

In 1826 he was in Norwich: the "Romantic Ballads" were published there,
and in May he received a letter from Allan Cunningham, whose cheery
commendatory verses ushered in the book. The letter suggests that Borrow
was indolent from apathy. The book had no success or notice, which Knapp
puts down to his not sending out presentation copies. "I judge,
however," says he, "that he sent one to Walter Scott, and that that busy
writer forgot to acknowledge the courtesy. Borrow's lifelong hostility
to Scott would thus be accounted for;" but the hostility is his reason
for supposing that the copy was sent. Some time afterwards, in 1826, he
was at 26, Bryanstone Street, Portman Square, and was to sit for the
artist, B. R. Haydon, before going off to the South of France. If he
went, he may have paid the visits to Paris, Bayonne, Italy and Spain,
which he alludes to in "The Bible in Spain"; he may, as Dr. Knapp
suggests, have covered the ground of Murtagh's alleged travels in "The
Romany Rye," and have been at Pau, with Quesada's army marching to
Pamplona, at Torrelodones, and at Seville. But in a letter to the Bible
Society in 1838 he spoke of his earlier acquaintance with Spain being
confined almost entirely to Madrid. It may be true, as he says in "The
Zincali," tha