[8] It is just worth noting that St. Columbanus (543–615) was accustomed to celebrate the Eucharist in vessels of bronze (aeris), alleging as a reason for so doing that Our Lord was affixed to the cross by brazen nails.—Smith’s Dict. Christ. Antiqs., s.v. Chalice. [↑]
[9] Cf. supra, p. xi., line 13. [↑]
[10] Information supplied by M. Omont of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, and by Prof. von Dobschütz of Jena, shows that the komodromos passage is to be found in neither of these two MSS. It has still to be sought for, then. [↑]
[11] In his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der deutschen Zigeuner (Halle, 1894, pp. 5–6), Herr Richard Pischel maintains, as it seems to me, successfully, that the ‘Bemische [[xxxii]]lute’ (Boehmische Leute) at Würzburg between 1372 and 1400 were real Bohemians and not Gypsies. [↑]
[12] No Greek loan-word has more interest for us than paramísi or paramísa, a story (Mod. Gk. παραμύθι). It occurs in the dialects of the Roumanian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, German, and English Gypsies. I heard it myself first in 1872 near Oxford, from old Lolli Buckland, in the curious sense of stars:—‘As you kistas kérri ke-ráti, réia, túti’ll dik the paramíshis vellin’ avri adré the leeline’ (As you ride home this evening, sir, you’ll see the stars coming out in the darkness). How she came to apply the word thus, I cannot say, perhaps from the mere jingle of stars and stories, perhaps from the notion of the stars foretelling the future. Again, in 1879, from one of the Boswells, I heard the verb páramis, ‘to talk scandal, tell tales.’ And lastly, Mr. Sampson got paramissa in its proper sense of ‘story’ from the old tinker Philip Murray, who, though no Gypsy himself, had an unrivalled knowledge of Gypsydom and Rómani (Gyp. Lore Jour., iii. 77). [↑]
[13] In Chronicles of a Virgin Fortress (1896), Mr. W. V. Herbert gives an extraordinary story of one of the Stanleys, who, forced to fly Hampshire for some offence, found his way to Bulgaria, and as ‘Istanli’ became a Gypsy chieftain and public executioner of Widdin about 1874. Tom Taylor’s returned ‘lag’ of p. xvii recurs also to memory, and John Lee, the Gypsy recruit of ‘John Company,’ from whom on the outward voyage in 1805 Lieut. Francis Irvine of the Bengal Native Infantry took down a Rómani vocabulary of 138 words (Trans. Lit. Soc. Bombay, 1819). [↑]
[14] In 1894 there was a small band of Bosnian Gypsies at St. Jean de Luz on their way to Spain. They were evidently well-off. [↑]
[15] The tented Gypsies in Calabria in May 1777, described in Henry Swinburne’s Travels in the Two Sicilies (2nd ed. ii. 168–172), were almost certainly [[xli]]not Italian Gypsies, but Caldarari. Borrow speaks of the foreign excursions of the Hungarian Gypsies, which frequently endure for three or four years, and extend to France, even to Rome (The Zincali, 1841, i. 13); and Adriano Colocci tells in Gli Zingari (Turin, 1889), p. 181, how in the Apennines of Fossato he encountered Hungarian Gypsies who seemed quite at home there, as also how at Kadi Köi in Asia Minor he had discourse with a band of Neapolitan Gypsies. [↑]
[16] Against this statement I must set what was quite a typical remark of an English Gypsy, a Boswell:—‘That’s a thing, sir, I should be disdainful of, to be júvalo’ (verminous). [↑]
[17] Query, Solomon Jones? Jones I know for a real Gypsy surname. [↑]