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Updated: June 20, 2025
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.
I also had Charles O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer, Dumas' Dame de Monsereau and Monte Cristo, Flaubert's Education Sentimentale, Gibbon's Rise and Fall, and Borrow's Zincali. It was always possible to get books through the mail, although they were generally many months en route.
For his Spanish-Gypsy vocabulary in The Zincali he certainly drew largely either on Richard Bright's Travels through Lower Hungary or on Bright's Spanish authority, whatever that may have been. His knowledge of the strange history of the Gypsies was very elementary, of their manners almost more so, and of their folk-lore practically nil.
The Zincali had been begun at Badajos with the Romany songs or rhymes copied down as recited by his gypsy friends. To these he had subsequently added, being assisted by a French courier, Juan Antonio Bailly, who translated the songs into Spanish. These translations were originally intended to be published in a separate work, as was the Vocabulary, which forms part of The Zincali.
"The Zincali" was not published before Borrow realised what a treasure he had deposited with the Bible Society, and not long afterwards he obtained the loan of his letters to make a new book on his travels in Spain.
If he stayed three weeks in Badajoz because he knew he should never meet any people "more in need of a little Christian exhortation" than the Gypsies, he did not fill his pages with three weeks of Christian exhortation, but told the story of the Gypsy soldier, Antonio how he recognised as a Gypsy the enemy who was about to kill him, and saved himself from the uplifted bayonet by crying "Zincalo, Zincalo!" and then, having been revived by him, sat for hours with his late enemy, who said: "Let the dogs fight and tear each other's throats till they are all destroyed, what matters it to the Zincali? they are not of our blood, and shall that be shed for them?"
The five works of Borrow's maturity from "The Zincali: or the Gypsies of Spain," written when he had turned thirty, to "Wild Wales," written when he had turned fifty have this in common, and perhaps for their chief quality, that of set purpose and by inevitable accident they reveal Borrow, the body and the spirit of the man. Together they compose a portrait, if not a small gallery of portraits.
His health was not quite good, as he implies in the preface to "The Zincali," and he tried "the water system" and also "lessons in singing," to cure his indigestion and sleeplessness.
Still more important than this equestrian figure of Borrow on Sidi Habismilk is the note on "The English Dialect of the Rommany" hidden away at the end of the second edition of "The Zincali." "'Tachipen if I jaw 'doi, I can lel a bit of tan to hatch: N'etist I shan't puch kekomi wafu gorgies. "The above sentence, dear reader, I heard from the mouth of Mr.
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