FOOTNOTES.

The following extracts from The English Gipsies and their Language are interesting:—

“Other writers have had much to say of their incredible distrust of Gorgios and unwillingness to impart their language, but I have always found them obliging and communicative” (Pref. V.).—“In every part of the world it is extremely difficult to get Romany words even from intelligent Gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them” (p. 17).—“Now the reader is possibly aware that of all difficult tasks, one of the most difficult is to induce a disguised Gipsy, or even a professed one, to utter a word of Romany to a man not of the blood” (p. 37).—“Be it remembered, reader, that in Germany, at the present day, the mere fact of being a Gipsy is still treated as a crime” (p. 74).—“Though the language of the Gipsies has been kept a great secret for centuries, still a few words have in England oozed out here and there from some unguarded crevice” (p. 78).—“The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their Gipsy life and nature from the Gorgios would of itself indicate the depths of singularity concealed beneath their apparent life” (p. 153).—“Behind it all . . . . the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived . . . and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways” (p. 156).—“A feeling of free-masonry, and of guarding a social secret, long after they leave the roads and become highly reputable members of society. But they have a secret, and no one can know them who has not penetrated it” (p. 174).

With all that has been said, the words which I have put in italics have a curious meaning—that the Gipsies in giving their language to “strangers” “may be willing with all their heart to communicate them”! I have explained this subject at length in the Disquisition (pp. 281 and 282) in reference to Mr. Borrow and others, not in regard to the willingness and stupidity, but the shuffling of the Gipsy in giving the meaning of words, although isolated and abstract ideas might occasionally puzzle some of them; for they translated to Mr. Borrow the Apostles’ Creed, sentence by sentence. The Lord’s Prayer, given by Mr. Borrow, Mr. Leland admits to be “pure English Gipsy” (p. 70). I do not think Mr. Leland states, with what stock of words and how acquired, he first approached the Gipsies, and how he used them, to get inside of the guard of the tribe.

“If I have not given in this book a sketch of the history of the Gipsies, or statistics of their numbers, or accounts of their social condition in different countries, it is because nearly everything of the kind may be found in the works of George Borrow and Walter Simson” (xi.).

He did not find much of the kind mentioned in Mr. Borrow’s books, so far as I remember, and omitted to say that I had written very fully on the points stated. It would have been interesting to have been told by Mr. Leland about his being “puzzled and muddled” at what he saw at Cobham Fair, how he came to write, nine years before that, as follows:—

“There have been thousands of swell Romany chals who have moved in sporting circles of a higher class than they are to be found in at the present day” (p. 92).—“It may be worth while to state, in this connection, that Gipsy blood intermingled with Anglo-Saxon, when educated, generally results in intellectual and physical vigour” (p. 174).—And where was it that he found the idea that John Bunyan was a member of the Gipsy race (p. 63), if it was not as elaborately given in my Disquisition?

Including all of “the blood” in various positions in life, there are doubtless vastly more of the tribe in England than 20,000, considering the time they have been in the country, and the healthy and prolific nature of the race.