every type of every society, so ignorant of the habits, manners, and
language of thousands of really strange people who swarm on the highways
and bye-ways! We have had the squire and the governess, my lord and all
Bohemia--Bohemia, artistic and literary--but where are our _Vrais
Bohemiens_?--Out of Lavengro and Rommany Rye--nowhere. Yet there is to
be found among the children of Rom, or the descendants of the worshippers
of Rama, or the Doms or Coptic Romi, whatever their ancestors may have
been, more that is quaint and adapted to the purposes of the novelist,
than is to be found in any other class of the inhabitants of England. You
may not detect a trace of it on the roads; but once become truly
acquainted with a fair average specimen of a Gipsy, pass many days in
conversation with him, and above all acquire his confidence and respect,
and you will wonder that such a being, so entirely different from
yourself, could exist in Europe in the nineteenth century. It is said
that those who can converse with Irish peasants in their own native
tongue, form far higher opinions of their appreciation of the beautiful,
and of the elements of humour and pathos in their hearts, than do those
who know their thoughts only through the medium of English. I know from
my own observation that this is quite the case with the Indians of North
America, and it is unquestionably so with the Gipsy. When you know a
true specimen to the depths of his soul, you will find a character so
entirely strange, so utterly at variance with your ordinary conceptions
of humanity, that it is no exaggeration whatever to declare that it would
be a very difficult task for the best writer to convey to the most
intelligent reader an idea of his subject's nature. You have in him, to
begin with, a being whose every condition of life is in direct
contradiction to what you suppose every man's life in England must be. "I
was born in the open air," said a Gipsy to me a few days since; "and put
me down anywhere, in the fields or woods, I can always support myself."
Understand me, he did not mean by pilfering, since it was of America that