An early copy of The Bible in Spain seems to have been given to Ford by John Murray. In a letter[46] to the publisher he thus describes its character.
I read Borrow with great delight all the way down per rail, and it shortened the rapid flight of that velocipede. You may depend upon it that the book will sell, which, after all, is the rub. It is the antipodes of Lord Carnarvon, and yet how they tally in what they have in common, and that is much—the people, the scenery of Galicia, and the suspicions and absurdities of Spanish Jacks-in-office, who yield not in ignorance or insolence to any kind of red-tapists, hatched in the hot-beds of jobbery and utilitarian mares-nests. Borrow spares none of them. I see he hits right and left, and floors his man whenever he meets him. I am pleased with his honest sincerity of purpose and his graphic abrupt style. It is like an old Spanish ballad, leaping in medias res, going from incident to incident, bang, bang, bang, hops, steps, and jumps like a cracker, and leaving off like one, when you wish he would give you another touch or coup de grâce.
He really puts me in mind of Gil Blas; but he has not the sneer of the Frenchman, nor does he gild the bad. He has a touch of Bunyan, and, like that enthusiastic tinker, hammers away, à la Gitano, whenever he thinks he can thwack the Devil or his man-of-all-work on earth—the Pope. Therein he resembles my friend and everybody’s friend—Punch—who, amidst all his adventures, never spares the black one.
However, I am not going to review him now; for I know that Mr. Lockhart has expressed a wish that I should do it for the Quarterly Review. Now, a wish from my liege master is a command. I had half engaged myself elsewhere, thinking that he did not quite appreciate such a trump as I know Borrow to be. He is as full of meat as an egg, and a fresh-laid one—not one of your Inglis breed, long addled by over-bookmaking. Borrow will lay you golden eggs, and hatch them after the ways of Egypt; put salt on his tail and secure him in your coop, and beware how any poacher coaxes him with ‘raisins’ or reasons out of the Albemarle preserve.
When you see Mr. Lockhart tell him that I will do the paper. I owe my entire allegiance to the Q. R. flag.... Perhaps my understanding the full force of this “gratia” makes me over-partial to this wild Missionary; but I have ridden over the same tracks without the tracts, seen the same people, and know that he is true, and I believe that he believes all that he writes to be true.
Before the book appeared, Ford had already begun a review of the work,[47] the progress of which he reports to Addington: “Borrow has got,” says a letter dated June 28th, 1842, “a very singular book coming out—The Bible in Spain—the place where one would be the least likely to meet it.” “How gat it there?” he asks later (November 21st), and describes the book as “a sort of Gil Blas and Bunyan rolled together.” His review came out in the Edinburgh Review for February 1843 (vol. lxxvii. pp. 105-38).
I have been very busy (he writes, December 16th, 1842) about Borrow’s Bible in Spain. It is a most curious book, and mind you read it, if you can steal a moment. In the last Quarterly there is a paper by Lockhart, principally extracts, which will only give you a slight notion of the contents of the chorizo [sausage]. The first sentence will amuse you, in which Lockhart grieves that he let slip my gipsy paper.[48] I would have done one for the Quarterly Review, but he only could give me five days. That was enough to write with a pair of scissors, but not quite for such a paper as the subject deserved. So I have done a grandis et verbosa epistola, which has been offered to the Ed. Rev., and graciously accepted with many civil speeches. It is very careful, enters into the philosophy of Spanish fanaticism, etc., very anti-Gallican.
Borrow, writing to John Murray, February 25th, 1843, alludes to the Edinburgh article as “exceedingly brilliant and clever, but rather too epigrammatic, quotations scanty and not correct. Ford is certainly a most astonishing fellow; he quite flabbergasts me—handbooks, reviews, and I hear that he has just been writing a ‘Life of Velasquez’ for the Penny Cyclopædia.” But Ford’s infidelity to the orthodox organ provoked a characteristic note from the Duke of Wellington: “My dear Mr. Ford,” he wrote, “you think the Lord will forgive your former Whiggishisms: I daresay He may, but the Devil will have his due, and the contributions to the Edinburgh are items in his account.” With these and many other interruptions, the Handbook had made slow progress. Still, in its first draft, it was approaching completion.
Heavitree, Jan. 10, 1843.
How you must have disported in rural idleness. Oh Rus! Here we have enough of it, and too much of local festivities. How the excise can fall off I can’t imagine. Here Belly is the god of all classes. The squires are not scared with the tariff, which by the way has done me no good in any respect, nor any one else that I can hear of, while the income tax is a real, tangible, awful evil.