In "The Zincali" Borrow used some of his private notes and others supplied by Spanish friends, together with parts of letters to the Bible Society. It used to be supposed that "The Bible in Spain" was made up almost entirely from these letters. But this has now been disproved by the newly published "Letters of George Borrow to the Bible Society." {163a} These letters are about half the length of "The Bible in Spain," and yet only about a third part of them was used by Borrow in writing that book. Some of his letters were never received by the Society and had probably been lost on the way. But this was more of a disaster to the Society than to Borrow. He kept journals {163b} from which his letters were probably copied or composed; and he was able, for example, in July, 1836, to send the Society a detailed and dated account of his entry into Spain in January, and his intercourse with the Gypsies of Badajoz. It is also possible that the letters lent to him by the Society were far more numerous than those returned by him. He missed little that could have been turned to account, unless it was the suggestion that if he knew the country his safest way from Seville to Madrid was to go afoot in the dress of beggar or Gypsy, and the remark that in Tangier one of his principal associates was a black slave, whose country was only three days journey from Timbuctoo. {163c} He had already in 1835 planned to write "a small volume" on what he was about to see and hear in Spain, and it must have been from notes or full journals kept with this view that he drew for "The Zincali" and still more for "The Bible in Spain." He wrote his journals and letters very much as Cobbett his "Rural Rides," straight after days in the saddle. Except when he was presenting a matter of pure business he was not much troubled by the fact that he was addressing his employers, the Bible Society. He did not always begin "Bible" with a capital B, an error corrected by Mr. Darlow, his editor. He prefixed "Revd. and dear sir," and thought little more about them unless to add such a phrase as: "A fact which I hope I may be permitted to mention with gladness and with decent triumph in the Lord." He did not, however, scorn to make a favourable misrepresentation of his success, as for example in the interview with Mendizabal, which was reduced probably to the level of the facts in its book form. The Society were not always pleased with his frankness and confidence, and the Secretary complained of things which were inconvenient to be read aloud in a pious assembly, less concerned with sinners than with repentance, and not easily convinced by the improbable. He sent them, for example, after a specimen Gypsy translation of the Gospel of St. Luke and of the Lord's Prayer, "sixteen specimens of the horrid curses in use amongst the Spanish Gypsies," with translations into English. These do not re-appear either in "The Bible in Spain" or in the edition of Borrow's letters to the