cism
was passed on the manuscript, not the printed book.

Borrow and his wife took about six months to prepare the letters for
publication as a book. He took great pains with the writing and only
worked when he was in the mood. His health was not quite good, as he
implies in the preface to "The Zincali," and he tried "the water system"
and also "lessons in singing," to cure his indigestion and sleeplessness.
He had the advantage of Ford's advice, to avoid fine writing, mere
description, poetry and learned books, and to give plenty of "racy, real,
genuine scenes, and the more out of the way the better," stories of
adventure, extraordinary things, prisons, low life, Gypsies, and so on.
He was now drawing entirely from "his own well," and when the book was
out Ford took care to remark that the author had cast aside the learned
books which he had used as swimming corks in the "Zincali," and now
"leaped boldly into the tide" unaided. John Murray's reader sent back
the manuscript to be revised and augmented, and after this was done, "The
Bible in Spain" was published, at the end of 1842, when Borrow was thirty-
nine.

"The Bible in Spain" was praised and moreover purchased by everyone. It
was translated into French, American, Russian, and printed in America.
The "Athenaeum" found it a "genuine book"; the "Examiner" said that
"apart from its adventurous interest, its literary merit is
extraordinary." Ford compared it with an old Spanish ballad, "going from
incident to incident, bang, bang, bang!" and with Gil Blas, and with
Bunyan. Ford, it must be remembered, had ridden over the same tracks as
Borrow in Spain, but before him, and had written his own book with a
combination of learning and gusto that is one of the rarest of literary
virtues. Like Borrow he wrote fresh from the thing itself when possible,
asserting for example that the fat of the hams of Montanches, when
boiled, "looked like melted topazes, and the flavour defies language,
although we have dined on one this very day, in order to secure accuracy
and undeniable prose." For the benefit of the public Ford pointed out
that "the Bible and its distribution have been _the_ business of his
existence; whenever moral darkness brooded, there, the Bible in his hand,
he forced his way."

When Borrow was actually in Spain he was much influenced by the
conditions of the moment. The sun of Spain would shine so that he prized
it above English civilization. The anarc