"A connoisseur and major collector of paintings, who first brought the work of Velazquez to notice in England, Richard Ford had a profound effect on his hispanophile contemporaries with his encyclopedic Hand-Book for Travelers in Spain of 1845 (the fruit of his riding tours in Spain between 1830 and 1834) and Gatherings from Spain (1846). He was a more than useful artist, a colorful figure in early Victorian society and an influential literary critic - it was he who prompted John Murray to publish George Borrow's The Zincali and The Bible in Spain. Yet although his own writings are widely known, very little of consequence has been written about Ford himself."--BOOK JACKET.