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 contempt for those who were not middle-class Englishmen seemed unmitigated. Speaking of the Gypsies, to whom the schools were open and the laws kinder, he points out that, nevertheless, they remain jockeys and blacksmiths, though it is true they have in part given up their wandering life. But "much," he says, "will have been accomplished if, after the lapse of a hundred years, one hundred human beings shall have been evolved from the Gypsy stock who shall prove sober, honest, and useful members of society," _i.e._, resembling the Spaniards whom he so condemned. But if men love a big fellow at the street corner bellowing about sin and the wrath to come, they love him better if he was a black sinner before he became white as the driven snow. Borrow reprimanded Spaniard and Gypsy, but he also knew them: there is even a suspicion that he liked them, though in his public black-coated capacity he had to condemn them and regret that their destiny was perdition. Had he not said, in his preface, that he had known the Gypsies for twenty years and that they treated him well because they thought him a Gypsy? and in another place referred to the time when he lived with the English Gypsies? Had he not, in his introductions, spoken of "my brethren, the Smiths," a phrase then cryptic and only to be explained by revealing his sworn brotherhood with Ambrose Smith, the Jasper Petulengro of later books? He had said, moreover, in a perfectly genuine tone, with no trace of missionary declamation: