d Ford hit the nail on the head when he said with
quite wonderful prescience:

How I wish you had given us more about yourself, instead of the
extracts from those blunder-headed old Spaniards, who knew
nothing about gypsies! I shall give you the _rap_, on that, and
a hint to publish your whole adventures for the last twenty
years.[146]

Henceforth Borrow was to write about himself and to become a great
author in consequence. For in writing about himself as in _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_ he was to write exactly as he felt about the gypsies,
and to throw over them the glamour of his own point of view, the view of
a man who loved the broad highway and those who sojourned upon it. In
_The Gypsies of Spain_ we have a conventional estimate of the gypsies.
'There can be no doubt that they are human beings and have immortal
souls,' he says, even as if he were writing a letter to the Bible
Society. All his anecdotes about the gypsies are unfavourable to them,
suggestive only of them as knaves and cheats. From these pictures it is
a far cry to the creation of Jasper Petulengro and Isopel Berners. The
most noteworthy figure in _The Zincali_ is the gypsy soldier of
Valdepenas, an unholy rascal. 'To lie, to steal, to shed human
blood'--these are the most marked characteristics with which Borrow
endows the gypsies of Spain. 'Abject and vile as they have ever been,
the gitanos have nevertheless found admirers in Spain,' says the author
who came to be popularly recognised as the most enthusiastic admirer of
the gypsies in Spain and elsewhere. Read to-day by the lover of Borrow's
other books _The Zincali_ will be pronounced a readable collection of
anecdotes, interspersed with much dull matter, with here and there a
piece of admirable writing. But the book would scarcely have lived had
it not been followed by four works of so fine an individuality. Well
might Ford ask Borrow for more about himself and less of the extracts
from 'blunder-headed old Spaniards.' When Borrow came to write about
himself he revealed his real kindness for the gypsy folk. He gave us
Jasper Petulengro and the incomparable description of 'the wind on the
heath.' He kindled the imagination of men, proclaimed the joys of
vagabondage in a manner that thrilled many hearts. He had some
predecessors and many successors, but 'none could then, or can ever
again,' says the biographer of a later Rye, 'see or hear of Romanies
without thinking o