From a gloomily fanatical atheist Borrow changed to a cheerfully fanatical Protestant, described as "of the middle order in society, and a very produceable person." {126} He was probably never a good atheist of the reasonable critical type like William Taylor, whose thinking was too dull and too difficult for him. Above all it was too negative and unrelated to anything but the brain for the man who wrote "Lines to Six- foot-three" and consorted with Gypsies. He had taken atheism along with Taylor's literary and linguistic teaching, perhaps with some eagerness at first as a form of protest against conventionally pious and respectable Norwich life. The Bible Society and Mrs. Clarke and her friends came radiant and benevolent to his "looped and windowed" atheism. They gave him friends and money: they gave him an occupation on which he felt, and afterwards found, that he could spend his hesitating energies. He gathered up all his powers to serve the Bible Society. He suffered hunger, cold, imprisonment, wounded feet, long hours of indoor labour and long hours of dismal attendance upon inexorable official delay. Personally he irritated Mr. Brandram, the secretary, and his bold and unexpected ways gave the Society something to put up with, but he was always a faithful and enthusiastic servant. He had many reasons for being grateful to them. He, who was going to get himself imprisoned for atheism, had already become, as Mr. Cunningham thought, a man "of certain Christian principle," if "of no very exactly defined denomination of Christians." He certainly did become an unquestioning wild missionary--though not merely wild, for he was discreet in his boldness; he was careful to save the Society money; he made himself respected by the highest English and Spanish officials in Spain; so that in 1837, for the first time in the Society's history, an English ambassador made their cause a national one. He wanted to shout and the Bible Society gave him something to shout for. He wanted to fight and they gave him something to fight for. Twenty years afterwards, in writing the Appendix to "The Romany Rye," he looked back on his travels in Spain as on a campaign: