The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 10. Borrow
A contemporary book, The Bible in Spain (1843), by Ford’s friend Borrow, a work of extraordinary freshness, possessing a singular indescribable quality of its own, is, in some sort, complementary to Ford’s work. Borrow writes as a wanderer, as the friend and companion of gypsies, vagabonds and thieves. The two writers together supply a picture of Spain such as can scarcely be found in Spanish literature outside the pages of Don Quixote. They make the reader feel that, in a sense, the Pyrenees are the boundary of Europe, that Spain is, as it were, a detached fragment of the orient, Christian, but not wholly European—a country whose attraction lies in its contrast of rocky wilderness and teeming garden, of natural wealth and contented poverty, in the simplicity and dignity of its life, in the primitive brutality or beauty of its impulses, in its pleasant oriental courtesies.