ght glow of satisfaction at starting
on a book that brought the then certain millenium, of a Christian and
English cast, definitely nearer. Probably they liked to know that this
missionary called pugilistic combats "disgraceful and brutalising
exhibitions"; and they were almost as certainly, as we are to-day,
delighted with the descriptions that followed, because it brought for the
first time clearly before them a real prize-fighting scene, and the
author, a terrible child of fourteen, looking on--"why should I hide the
truth?" says he. This excellent moral tone accompanied the reader of
1841 with satisfaction to the end. For example, Borrow describes the
Gypsies at Tarifa swindling a country man and woman out of their donkey.
When he sees them being treated and fondled by their intending robbers,
he exclaims: "Behold, poor humanity, thought I to myself, in the hands of
devils; in this manner are human souls ensnared to destruction by the
fiends of the pit." When he sees them departing penniless and without
their donkey, the woman bitterly lamenting it, he comments: "Upon the
whole, however, I did not much pity them. The woman was certainly not
the man's wife. The labourer had probably left his village with some
strolling harlot, bringing with him the animal which had previously
served to support himself and a family." Borrow was a man who pronounced
the Bible to be "the wonderful Book which is capable of resolving every
mystery." He was a man, furthermore, who called sorcery simply "a thing
impossible," and thus addressed a writer on chiromancy: "We . . . believe
that the lines of the hand have as little connection with the events of
life as with the liver and stomach, notwithstanding Aristotle, who you
forget was a heathen and cared as little for the Scriptures as the
Gitanos, whether male or female."

Another satisfactory side to Borrow's public character, as revealed in
"The Zincali," was his contempt for "other nations," such as Spain--"a
country whose name has long and justly been considered as synonymous with
every species of ignorance and barbarism." His voice rises when he says
that "avarice has always been the dominant passion in Spanish minds,
their rage for money being only to be compared to the wild hunger of
wolves for horseflesh in the time of winter; next to avarice, envy of
superior talent and accomplishment is the prevailing passion." These
were the people whom he had gone to convert. His con