The English Gipsies and Their Language

Causes which formed it.-Moral Results of hungry Marauding.-Gipsy ideas of Religion. The Scripture story of the Seven Whistlers.-The

philological facts which are connected with an immense proportion of our out-of-door population. There are, indeed, very few people who know, that every time we look from the window into a crowded street, the chances are greatly in fav

g horses," or trading in them, while the idler or more moral ones, pick up their living as easily as a mouse in a cheese, on the endless roads and in the forests. And so many of them have gone there, that I am sure the child is now born, to whom the sight of a real old-fashioned gipsy will be as rare in England as a Sioux or Pawnee warrior in the streets of New York or Philadelphia. But there is a modified and yet real Rommany-dom, which lives and will live with great vigour, so long as a regularly organised nomadic class exists on our roads-and it is the true nature and inner life of this class which has remained for ages, an impenetrable mystery to the world at large. A member of it may be a tramp and a beggar, the proprietor of some valuable travelling show,

wker whom you meet, and whose blue eyes and light hair indicate no trace of Oriental blood, may not be a churdo, or pāsh-ratt, or half-blood, or half-scrag, as a full Gipsy might contemptuously term him, but he may be, of his kind, a quadroon or octoroon, or he may have "gipsified," by marrying a Gipsy wife; and by the way be it said, such women make by far the best wives to be found among English itinerants, and the best suited for "a traveller." But in any case h

pot of beer at your expense, he may recall, with a grin, the fact that he has heard that the Gipsies have a queer kind of language of their own; and then, if you have any Rommany yourself at command, he will perhaps rākker Rommanis with greater or less fluency. Mr Simeon, in his

as walking along the Marine Parade in Brighton, I overtook a tinker. Wishing him to sharpen some tools for me, I directed him to proceed to my home, and en route spoke to him in Gipsy. As he was quite fair in complexion, I casually rema

ge which is, in the main, Sanscrit, with many Persian words intermingled. Mr Dickens, however, did not pretend, as some have done, to specially treat of Gipsies, and he made no affectation of a knowledge of any mysteries. He simply reflected popular life as he saw it. But there are many novels and tales, old and new, devoted to setting forth Rommany life and conversation, which are as much like the originals as a Pastor Fido is like a common shepherd. One novel which I once read, is so full of "the dark blood," that it might almost be called a gipsy novel. The hero is a gipsy; he lives among his kind-the book is full of them; and yet, with all due respect to its author, who is one of the most

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 varia

popli from dovo tem-(my brother, who has just returned from that country), tells me that when a cow or anything dies there, they just ch

could be found, I shou

hunt for a hotchewitchi,-a hedge-hog,-and I shou

nary hedge-hog, he proceeded to score and turn

u for dinner to-

. They're very fin

usted at the idea of feeding on many things which mere association and superstition render revolting. But the old fashioned gipsy has none of these qualms-he is haunted by no ghost of society-save the policeman, he knows none of its terrors. Whatever is edible he eats, except horse-meat; where

stitions and legends, which in themselves indicate no faith whatever in anything deeply seated. It would be difficult, I think, for any highly civilised man, who had not studied Thought deeply, and in a liberal spirit, to approach in the least to a rational comprehension of a real Gipsy mind. During my life it has been my fortune to become intimate with men who were "absolutely" or "positively" free-thinkers-men who had, by long study and mere logic, completely freed themselves from any mental tie whatever. Such men are rare; it requires an enormous amount of intellectual culture, an unlimited expenditure of pains in the metaphysical hot-bed, and tremendous self-confidence to produce them-I mean "the real article." Among the most thorough of these, a man on whom utter and entire freedom of thought sat easily and unconsciously, was a certain German

of piety, that on that day she neither told fortunes nor worked

u know what the Gipsies in Germ

the old lady.

es' church was made of p

the peal of laughter with which the Gip

in India, the Church, as in Italy, loses no time in making of all detected free-thinkers Pariahs. Thus we are told, in the introduction to the English translation of that very curious book, "The Tales of the Gooroo Simple," which should be read by every scholar, that all the true literature of the co

ered on one subject-how to get something to eat. I felt what it was to be wolfish and even ravening; and I noted, step by step, in myself, how a strange sagacity grew within me-an art of detecting food. It was during the American war, and there were thousands of us pitifully starved. When we came near some log hut I began at once to surmise, if I saw a flour sack lying about, that there was a mill not far distant; perhaps flour or bread in t

e which he ever detected in an old Gipsy woman, was that she once dreamed she was in heaven. It appeared to her as a large garden, full of fine fat hedgehogs. "This is," says Mr Liebich, "unquestionably ve

t may seem to you, reader, his intercourse with Christians has all over Europe been so limited, that he seldom really knows what religion is. The same Mr Liebich tells us that one day he overheard a Gipsy disputing with his wife as to what was the true character of the belief of the Gentiles. Both admitted that there was a great elder grown up God (the baro puro dewel), and a sm

must admit that their ideas of what the Bible contains are extremely vague. One day I was sitting with an old Gipsy, discussin

ere is a story that once they were seven sisters, but one of them was lost, and so they are

sy, "is like the one of the Seven Whistl

ha

rds. And it says in the Bible that once on a time one got lost, and never came back again, and now the six whistles to fin

e, "how they always tells these here stories

N

out the Baker. For there's seven great stories, and they say that hundreds of years ago a baker used to come with loaves of bread, and waste it all a tryin' to make s

ally curious that the Gipsy term for an owlet is the Māromengro's Chavi, or Baker's Daughter, and that they are all familiar with the monkish legend which declares that Jesu

othin

ire laid dow

when a blo

loaf the m

wonder, s

t forth a wi

ring fast i

woods a wa

in Scandinavia. Once a year, by night, the Gipsies of that country assemble for the purpose of un-baptizing all of their children whom they have, during the year, suffered to be baptized for the sake of gifts, by the Gor

elligent gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them. It may seem simple enough to the reader to ask a man "How do you call 'to carry' in your language?" But can the reader understand that a man, who is possibly very much shrewder than himself in reading at a glance many phases of character, and in countless trickeries, should be literally unable to answer such a question? And yet I have met with many such. The truth is, that there are people in this world who never had such a thing as an abstract idea, let us say even of an apple, plumped suddenly at them-not once in all their lives-and, when it came, the unphilosophical mind could no more grasp it, than the gentleman mentioned by G. H. Lewes (History of Philosophy), could grasp the ide

is changed with the fleeting second by some associated thought, which materially modifies it. It is always difficult, in consequence, to take down a story in the exact terms which a philologist desires. There are two words for "bad" in English Gipsy, wafro and vessavo; and I think it must have taken me ten minutes one day to learn, from a by no means dull gipsy, whet

e kushto Rommany chal for a version of ?sop's fable of the youth and the cat. He is sitti

anis, in Gipsy-Once upon a time th

é yeck cheirus-a rak

t is half done, the professor of Rommany, becom

a chillico apré a rukk-(and the cat

That is not it! Now go on. The

"that he thought her skin woul

gloves! Now d

ury: "I'm sure I was telling the st

uch as wait patiently for a month behind a chair, or tug for six months at a plough, or in short, acquire the civilised virtue of Christian patience. That is it. We often hear in this world that a little educati

on of innumerable wise and moral precepts have, by the practice of thousands of years, produced in him their natural result. Whenever he attempts to think, his mind runs at once into some broad and open path, beautifully bordered with dry artificial flowers, {21} and the result has been the inability to comprehend any new idea-a state to which the Church of the Middle Ages, or any too rigidly established system, would in a few thousand years have reduced humanity. Under the action of widely different causes, the gipsy has also a different cast of mind from our own, and a radical moral difference. A very few years ago, when I