and I thought that to convey the Gospel to a place so wild and remote might perhaps be considered an acceptable pilgrimage in the eyes of my Maker. True it is that but one copy remained of those which I had brought with me on this last journey; but this reflection, far from discouraging me in my projected enterprise, produced the contrary effect, as I called to mind that, ever since the Lord revealed Himself to man, it has seemed good to Him to accomplish the greatest ends by apparently the most insufficient means; and I reflected that this one copy might serve as an instrument for more good than the four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine copies of the edition of Madrid.
I shall not detain the course of my narrative with reflections as to the state of a Church which, though it pretends to be founded on scripture, would yet keep the light of scripture from all mankind, if possible. But Rome is fully aware that she is not a Christian Church, and having no desire to become so, she acts prudently in keeping from the eyes of her followers the page which would reveal to them the truths of Christianity.
All this does not ring quite true, and in any case it is too much on the lines of 'Sunday reading' to please the small boy, who must, however, have found a thousand things in that volume that were to his taste—some of the wildest adventures, hairbreadth escapes, extraordinary meetings again and again with unique people—with Benedict Mol, for example, who was always seeking for treasure. Gypsies, bull-fighters, quaint and queer characters of every kind, come before us in rapid succession. Rarely, surely, have so many adventures been crowded into the same number of pages. Only when Borrow remembers, as he has to do occasionally, that he is an agent of the Bible Society does the book lose its vigour and its charm. We have already pointed out that the foundations of the volume were contained in certain letters written by Borrow during his five years in Spain to the secretaries of the Bible Society in London. The recent publication of these letters has revealed to us Borrow's methods. When he had settled down at Oulton he took down his notebooks, one of which is before me, but finding this was not sufficient, he asked the Bible Society for the loan of his letters to them.[156] Other letters that he hoped to use were not forthcoming, as the following note from Miss Gurney to Mrs. Borrow indicates:
To Mrs. George Borrow
Earlham, 12th June 1840.
Dear Mrs. Borrow,—I am sorry I cannot find any of Mr. Borrow's letters from Spain. I don't think we ever had any, but my brother is from home and I therefore cannot inquire of him. I send you the only two I can find. I am very glad he is going to publish his travels, which I have no doubt will be very interesting. It must be a pleasant object to assist him by copying the manuscripts. If I should visit Lowestoft this summer I shall hope to see you, but I have no immediate prospect of doing so. With kind regards to all your party, I am, Dear Mrs. Borrow, Yours sincerely,
C. Gurney.[157]
The Bible Society applied to in the same manner lent Borrow all his letters to that organisation and its secretaries. Not all were returned. Many came to Dr. Knapp when he purchased the half of the Borrow papers that were sold after Borrow's death; the remainder are in my possession. It is a nice point, seventy years after they were written, as to whom they belong. In any case the Bible Society must have kept copies of everything, for when, in 1911, they came to publish the Letters[158] the collection was sufficiently complete. That publication revealed some interesting sidelights. It proved on the one hand that Borrow had drawn more upon his diaries than upon his letters, although he frequently reproduced fragments of his diaries in his letters. It revealed further the extraordinary frankness with which Borrow wrote to his employers. But the main point is in the discovery revealed to us that Borrow was not an artist in his letters. Borrow was never a good letter writer, although I think that many of the letters that appear for the first time in these pages will prove that his letters are very interesting as contributions to biography. If some of the letters that helped to make up The Bible in Spain are interesting, it is because in them Borrow incorporated considerable fragments of anecdote and adventure from his notebooks. It is quite a mistake to assume, as does Dr. Knapp, that the 'Rev. and Dear Sir' at the head of a letter was the only variation. You will look in vain in the Bible Society correspondence for many a pearl that is contained in The Bible in Spain, and you will look in vain in The Bible in Spain for many a sentence which concludes some of the original letters. In one case, indeed, a letter concludes with Heber's hymn—
'From Greenland's Icy Mountains,'