hy and wildness of Spain at
another time would make him hate both men and land. But more lasting
than joy in the sun and misery at the sight of misery was the feeling
that he was "adrift in Spain, the land of old renown, the land of wonder
and mystery, with better opportunities of becoming acquainted with its
strange secrets and peculiarities than, perhaps, ever yet were afforded
to any individual, certainly to a foreigner." When he entered it, by
crossing a brook, out of Portugal, he shouted the Spanish battle-cry in
ecstasy, and in the end he described his five years in Spain as, "if not
the most eventful"--he cannot refrain from that vainglorious dark
hint--yet "the most happy years" of his existence. Spain was to him "the
most magnificent country in the world": it was also "one of the few
countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and I may
add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolized." His book is a song of
wild Spain when Spain _was_ Spain.

Borrow, as we already know, had in him many of the powers that go to make
a great book, yet "The Zincali" was not a great book. The important
power developed or employed later which made "The Bible in Spain" a great
book was the power of narrative. The writing of those letters from Spain
to the Bible Society had taught him or discovered in him the instinct for
proportion and connection which is the simplest, most inexplicable and
most essential of literary gifts. With the help of this he could write
narrative that should suggest and represent the continuity of life. He
could pause for description or dialogue or reflection without
interrupting this stream of life. Nothing need be, and nothing was,
alien to the narrator with this gift; for his writing would now
assimilate everything and enrich itself continually.

The reader could follow, as he preferred, the Bible distribution in
particular, or the Gypsies, or Borrow himself, through the long ways and
dense forests of the book, and through the moral darkness of Spain. It
could be treated as a pious book, and as such it was attacked by
Catholics, as "Lavengro" still is. For certainly Borrow made no secret
of his piety. When "a fine young man of twenty-seven, the only son of a
widowed mother . . . the best sailor on board, and beloved by all who
were acquainted with him" was swept off the ship in which Borrow was
sailing, and drowned, as he had dreamed he would be, the author
exclaimed: "Truly