Mr. Carlyle’s story reminds me that Walter Simpson, in his history of them, says that the Scottish gypsies have ever been distinguished for their gratitude to those who treated them with civility and kindness, anent which he tells a capital story, while other instances sparkle here and there with many brilliant touches in his five hundred-and-fifty-page volume.
I have more than once met with Romanys, when
I was in the company of men who, like Carlyle and Bilderdijk, “were also in the world of letters known,” or who might say, “We have deserved to be.” One of the many memories of golden days, all in the merrie tyme of summer song in England, is of the Thames, and of a pleasure party in a little steam-launch. It was a weenie affair,—just room for six forward outside the cubby, which was called the cabin; and of these six, one was Mr. Roebuck,—“the last Englishman,” as some one has called him, but as the late Lord Lytton applies the same term to one of his characters about the time of the Conquest, its accuracy may be doubted. Say the last type of a certain phase of the Englishman; say that Roebuck was the last of the old iron and oak men, the triplex æs et robur chiefs of the Cobbet kind, and the phrase may pass. But it will only pass over into a new variety of true manhood. However frequently the last Englishman may die, I hope it will be ever said of him, Le roi est mort,—vive le roi! I have had talks with Lord Lytton on gypsies. He, too, was once a Romany rye in a small way, and in the gay May heyday of his young manhood once went off with a band of Romanys, and passed weeks in their tents,—no bad thing, either, for anybody. I was more than once tempted to tell him the strange fact that, though he had been among the black people and thought he had learned their language, what they had imposed upon him for that was not Romany, but cant, or English thieves’ slang. For what is given, in good faith, as the gypsy tongue in “Paul Clifford” and the “Disowned,” is only the same old mumping kennick which was palmed off on Bampfylde Moore Carew; or which he palmed on his readers, as the secret of
the Roms. But what is the use or humanity of disillusioning an author by correcting an error forty years old. If one could have corrected it in the proof, à la bonne heure! Besides, it was of no particular consequence to anybody whether the characters in “Paul Clifford” called a clergyman a patter-cove or a rashai. It is a supreme moment of triumph for a man when he discovers that his specialty—whatever it be—is not of such value as to be worth troubling anybody with it. As for Everybody, he is fair game.
The boat went up the Thames, and I remember that the river was, that morning, unusually beautiful. It is graceful, as in an outline, even when leaden with November mists, or iron-gray in the drizzle of December, but under the golden sunlight of June it is lovely. It becomes every year, with gay boating parties in semi-fancy dresses, more of a carnival, in which the carnivalers and their carnivalentines assume a more decided character. It is very strange to see this tendency of the age to unfold itself in new festival forms, when those who believe that there can never be any poetry or picturing in life but in the past are wailing over the vanishing of May-poles and old English sports. There may be, from time to time, a pause between the acts; the curtain may be down a little longer than usual; but in the long run the world-old play of the Peoples’ Holiday will go on, as it has been going ever since Satan suggested that little apple-stealing excursion to Eve, which, as explained by the Talmudists, was manifestly the direct cause of all the flirtations and other dreadful doings in all little outings down to the present day, in the drawing-room or “on the leads,” world without end.
And as the boat went along by Weybridge we
passed a bank by which was a small gypsy camp; tents and wagons, donkeys and all, reflected in the silent stream, as much as were the swans in the fore-water. And in the camp was a tall, handsome, wild beauty, named Britannia, who knew me well; a damsel fond of larking, with as much genuine devil’s gunpowder in her as would have made an entire pack or a Chinese hundred of sixty-four of the small crackers known as fast girls, in or around society. She was a splendid creature, long and lithe and lissom, but well rounded, of a figure suggestive of leaping hedges; and as the sun shone on her white teeth and burning black eyes, there was a hint of biting, too, about her. She lay coiled and basking, in feline fashion, in the sun; but at sight of me on the boat, up she bounded, and ran along the bank, easily keeping up with the steamer, and crying out to me in Romanes.
Now it just so happened that I by no means felt certain that all of the company present were such genial Bohemians as to appreciate anything like the joyous intimacy which Britannia was manifesting, as she, Atalanta-like, coursed along. Consequently, I was not delighted with her attentions.
“What a fine girl!” said Mr. Roebuck. “How well she would look on the stage! She seems to know you.”
“Certainly,” said one of the ladies, “or she would not be speaking her language. Why don’t you answer her? Let us hear a conversation.”