sal, to print and publish 750 copies of _The
Gypsies of Spain_, and divide the profits with the author.

It was at the suggestion of Richard Ford, then the greatest living
English authority on Spain, that Mr. Murray published the book. It did
not really commence to sell until _The Bible in Spain_ came a year or so
later to bring the author reputation.[144] From November 1840 to June
1841 only three hundred copies had been sold in spite of friendly
reviews in some half dozen journals, including _The Athenaeum_ and _The
Literary Gazette_. The first edition, it may be mentioned, contained on
its title-page a description of the author as 'late agent of the British
and Foreign Bible Society in Spain.'[145] There is very marked
compression in the edition now in circulation, and a perusal of the
first edition reveals many interesting features that deserve to be
restored for the benefit of the curious. But nothing can make _The
Zincali_ a great piece of literature. It was summarised by the
_Edinburgh Review_ at the time as 'a hotch-potch of the jockey, tramper,
philologist, and missionary.' That description, which was not intended
to be as flattering as it sounds to-day, appears more to apply to _The
Bible in Spain_. But _The Zincali_ is too confused, too ill-arranged a
book to rank with Borrow's four great works. There are passages in it,
indeed, so eloquent, so romantic, that no lover of Borrow's writings can
afford to neglect them. But this was not the book that gypsy-loving
Borrow, with the temperament of a Romany, should have written, or could
have written had he not been obsessed by the 'science' of his subject.
His real work in gypsydom was to appear later in _Lavengro_ and _The
Romany Rye_. For Borrow was not a man of science--a philologist, a
folk-lorist of the first order.

No one, indeed, who had read only _The Zincali_ among Borrow's works
could see in it any suspicion of the writer who was for all time to
throw a glamour over the gypsy, to make the 'children of the open air' a
veritable cult, to earn for him the title of 'the walking lord of gypsy
lore,' and to lay the foundations of an admirable succession of books
both in fact and fiction--but not one as great as his own. The city of
Seville, it is clear, with sarcastic letters from Bible Society
secretaries on one side, and some manner of love romance on the other,
was not so good a place for an author to produce a real book as Oulton
was to become. Richar