All hail! ye British Buccaneers! Ye English Ishmaelites, all hail! Man's cultured Eden casts ye forth, The spacious earth before you spread, The Gipsy King. By RICHARD HOWITT. THE picture of the Rural Life of England must be wofully defective which should omit those singular and most picturesque squatters on heaths and in lanes, the Gipsies. They make part and parcel of the landscape scenery of England. They are an essential portion of our poetry and literature. They are moulded into our memories, and all our associations of the country by the surprise of our first seeing them, by the stories of their cunning, their petty larcenies, their fortune-tellings, and by the writings of almost all our best poets and essayists. The poets being vividly impressed by anything picturesque, and partaking of some mystery and romance, universally talk of them with an unction of enjoyment. Romance writers have found them more profitable subjects than his Majesty does-Scott and Victor Hugo especially. But the first introduction to them, which most of us had in print, and to which the mind of every man of taste must instantly revert on seeing or hearing of them, is that most admirable and racy one in the Spectator,-that gipsy adventure of our truly beloved and honoured friend, Sir Roger de Coverley-that perfect model of an old English gentleman. Who does not think of this scene with a peculiar delight, especially since it has received so exquisite a representation from the pencil of Leslie? "As I was yesterday riding out in the fields with my friend Sir Roger, we saw at a little distance from us a troop of gipsies. Upon the first discovery of them, my friend was in some doubt whether he should not exert the Justice of the Peace upon a band of lawless vagrants; but not having his clerk with him, who is a necessary counsellor on these occasions, and fearing that his poultry might fare the worse for it, he let the thought drop, but at the same time gave me a particular account of the mischiefs they do in the country in stealing peoples' goods, and spoiling their servants. If a stray piece of linen hangs upon a hedge, says Sir Roger, they are sure to have it: if the hog loses its way in the fields, it is ten to one but it becomes their prey. Our geese cannot lie in peace for them. "If a man prosecutes them with severity, his henroost is sure to pay for it. They generally straggle into this part of the country about this time of the year, and set the heads of our servant-maids so agog for husbands, that we do not expect to have any business done as it should be while they are in the country. I have an honest dairy-maid who crosses their hands with a piece of silver every summer, and never fails being promised the handsomest young fellow in the parish for her pains. Your friend the butler has been fool enough to be seduced by them; and though he is sure to lose a knife, a fork, or a spoon every time his fortune is told him, generally shuts himself up in the pantry with an old gipsy for above half an hour once a twelvemonth. Sweethearts are the things which they live upon, which they bestow very plentifully upon all those that apply themselves to them. You see now and then some handsome young jades amongst them, the sluts have very often white teeth and black eyes.' "Sir Roger observing that I listened with great attention to his account of a people who were so entirely new to me, told me that if I would, they should tell us our fortunes. As I was very well pleased with the knight's proposal, we rid up and communicated our hands to them. A Cassandra of the race, after having examined my lines very diligently, told me that I loved a pretty maid in a corner; that I was a good woman's man; with some other particulars which I do not think proper to relate. My friend Sir Roger alighted from his horse, and exposing his palm to two or three that stood by him, they crumpled it into all shapes, and diligently scanned every wrinkle that could be made in it; when one of them, who was older and more sunburnt than the rest, told him that he had a widow in his line of life. Upon which the knight cried, 'go, go, you are an idle baggage,' and at the same time. smiled upon me. The gipsy, finding that he was not displeased in his heart, told him, after a further inquiry into his hand, that his true-love was constant, and that he should dream of her to night. My old friend cried Pish,' and bid her go on. The gipsy told him that he was a bachelor, but would not be so long; and that he was dearer to somebody than he thought. The knight still repeated that she was an idle baggage, and bid her go on. 'Ah, master,' says the gipsy, that roguish leer of yours makes a woman's heart ache. You have not that simper about the mouth for nothing.' The uncouth gibberish with which all this was uttered, like the darkness of an oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the knight left the money with her that he had crossed the hand with, and got up again on his horse. "As we were riding away, Sir Roger told me, that he knew several sensible people who believed these gipsies now and then foretold very strange things; and for half an hour together appeared more jocund than ordinary. In the height of his good-humour, meeting a common beggar upon the road who was no conjurer, as he went to relieve him, he found his pocket picked; that being a kind of palmistry at which this race of vermin are very dexterous." This is a perfect piece of gipsyism. Wordsworth, Cowper, Crabbe, and others of our poets, have given very graphic sketches of them; but in all these descriptions you have the same characteristics, those of a strange, vagabond, out-of-door, artful and fortunetelling people. This was for a long time the only point of view in which they were regarded. That they were a thievish and uncivilizable race everybody knew, but what was their real origin, or what their real country, few cared to inquire. It, in fact, quite satisfied the public to consider them as what they pretended to be, Egyptians. In all the descriptions I have alluded to, no reference whatever is made to their origin. Addison alone hints that he could give some historical remarks on this idle people, but he does not think it worth while. But a more inquisitive age came. It began to strike the minds of intelligent men, as the love of the picturesque, the love of whatever was quiet, ancient, singular, or poetic in the features of the country grew into a strong public feeling, that there was something far more curious and mysterious about these people than merely met the eye. That they were a peculiar variety of the human species, and had hereditary causes, whether prejudices or traditions, which stamped them, as distinctly and as stubbornly, a separate portion of humanity as the Jews, became obvious enough. That which had been supposed a mere gibberish in their mouths, was found to be true Eastern language, and it was discovered that they not merely "infested all Europe," as Addison remarked, but all the world. In every quarter of it they were found, exhibiting the same strange and unchangeable lineaments, manners, and habits; in Egypt, as separate from the Egyptians in speech and custom, as they are separate from the English in England. Great curiosity was now ex |