ballads of his youth, "Elvir Hill." He gives the child himself weeping,
he knows not why. Yet the passage is one and indivisible.

These, at any rate, are not "lies--damned lies."




CHAPTER II--HIS OWN HERO


Borrow's principal study was himself, and in all his best books he is the
chief subject and the chief object. Yet when he came to write
confessedly and consecutively about himself he found it no easy task. Dr.
Knapp gives an interesting account of the stages by which he approached
and executed it. His first mature and original books, "The Zincali," or
"The Gypsies of Spain," and "The Bible in Spain," had a solid body of
subject matter more or less interesting in itself, and anyone with a pen
could have made it acceptable to the public which desires information.
"The Bible of Spain" was the book of the year 1843, read by everybody in
one or other of the six editions published in the first twelve months.
These books were also full of himself. Even "The Zincali," written for
the most part in Spain, when he was a man of about thirty and had no
reason for expecting the public to be interested in himself, especially
in a Gypsy crowd--even that early book prophesied very different things.
He said in the "preface" that he bore the Gypsies no ill-will, for he had
known them "for upwards of twenty years, in various countries, and they
never injured a hair of his head, or deprived him of a shred of his
raiment." The motive for this forbearance, he said, was that they
thought him a Gypsy. In his "introduction" he satisfied some curiosity,