There is a sort of grotesque humour in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class—some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough merriment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme. I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense—a degree of Pariahism which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a small one—the descendants of degraded females in our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labour, and even secular knowledge, as at least the second-best things, in their moral bearing and influence, that can exist among a people.
CHAPTER XVIII.
"For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan
In the make of that wonderful creature called man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same.
Though like as was ever twin-brother to brother.
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other."—Burns.