a book on the English Gypsies and their language; but before I announced it, I wrote a letter to Father George, telling him that I proposed to print it, and asking his permission to dedicate it to him. He did not answer the letter, but ‘worked the tip’ promptly enough, for he immediately announced in the newspapers on the following Monday his ‘Word-book of the Romany Language,’ ‘with many pieces in Gypsy, illustrative of the way of speaking and thinking of the English Gypsies, with specimens of their poetry, and an account of various things relating to Gypsy life in England.’ This was exactly what I had told him that my book would contain. . . . I had no ill-feeling about it.
“My obligations to him for ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ and his other works are such as I owe to few men. I have enjoyed Gypsying more than any other sport in the world, and I owe my love of it to George Borrow.”
“The English Gypsies” appeared in 1873, and the “Romano Lavo-Lil” in 1874.
“Romano Lavo-Lil” contains a note on the English Gypsy language, a word-book, some Gypsy songs and anecdotes with English translations, a list of Gypsy names of English counties and towns, and accounts of several visits to Gypsy camps in London and the country. It was hastily put together, and the word-book, for example, did not include all the Romany used in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” There were now critics capable of discovering other shortcomings.
Borrow’s book was reviewed along with Leland’s “English Gypsies” and Dr. Miklosich’s “Dialects and Migrations of the Gypsies in Europe,” and he was attacked for his derivations, his ignorance of philology and of other writers on his subject, his sketchy knowledge of languages, his interference with the purity of the idiom in his Romany
specimens. His Gypsy songs were found interesting, his translations, of course, bad. The final opinion of the book as a book on the Gypsy language was: [{310}]
“Whether or not Mr. Borrow has in the course of his long experience become the deep Gypsy which he has always been supposed to be, we cannot say; but it is certain that his present book contains little more than he gave to the public forty years ago, and does not by any means represent the present state of knowledge on the subject. But at the present day, when comparative philology has made such strides, and when want of accurate scholarship is as little tolerated in strange and remote languages as in classical literature, the ‘Romano Lavo-Lil’ is, to speak mildly, an anachronism.”
Nor, apart from the word-book and Gypsy specimens, is the book a good example of Borrow’s writing. The accounts of visits to Gypsies at Kirk Yetholm, Wandsworth, Pottery Lane (Notting Hill), and Friar’s Mount (Shore-ditch), are interesting as much for what they tell us of Borrow’s recreations in London as for anything else. The portrait of the “dark, mysterious, beautiful, terrible” Mrs. Cooper, the story of Clara Bosvil, the life of Ryley Bosvil—“a thorough Gypsy, versed in all the arts of the old race, had two wives, never went to church, and considered that when a man died he was cast into the earth, and there was an end of him”—and his death and burial ceremony, and some of Borrow’s own opinions, for example, in favour of Pontius Pilate and George IV.—these are simple and vigorous in the old style. They show that with a sufficient impulse he could have written another book at least equal to “Wild Wales.” But these uneven fragments were not worthy of the living man. They were the sort of thing that his friends might have been expected to gather up after
he was dead. Scraps like this from “Wisdom of the Egyptians,” are well enough:
“‘My father, why were worms made?’ ‘My son, that moles might live by eating them.’ ‘My father, why were moles made?’ ‘My son, that you and I might live by catching them.’ ‘My father, why were you and I made?’ ‘My son, that worms might live by eating us.’”