PART III.
PICTURESQUE AND MORAL FEATURES OF THE COUNTRY.
CHAPTER I.
GIPSIES.
All hail! ye British Buccaneers!
Ye English Ishmaelites, all hail!
A jovial and marauding band,
Against the goodliest of the land
Ye go, and ye prevail.
Man’s cultured Eden casts ye forth,
Where’er ye list to wander wide,
Wild heaths and wilder glens to tread,
The spacious earth before you spread,
Your hearts your only guide.
The Gipsy King. By Richard Howitt.
The picture of the Rural Life of England must be wofully defective which should omit those singular and most picturesque squatters on heaths and in lanes, the Gipsies. They make part and parcel of the landscape scenery of England. They are an essential portion of our poetry and literature. They are moulded into our memories, and all our associations of the country by the surprise of our first seeing them,—by the stories of their cunning, their petty larcenies, their fortune-tellings,—and by the writings of almost all our best poets and essayists. The poets being vividly impressed by anything picturesque, and partaking of some mystery and romance, universally talk of them with an unction of enjoyment. Romance writers have found them more profitable subjects than her Majesty does—Scott and Victor Hugo especially. But the first introduction to them, which most of us had in print, and to which the mind of every man of taste must instantly revert on seeing or hearing of them, is that most admirable and racy one in the Spectator,—that gipsy adventure of our truly beloved and honoured friend, Sir Roger de Coverley—that perfect model of an old English gentleman. Who does not think of this scene with a peculiar delight, especially since it has received so exquisite a representation from the pencil of Leslie? “As I was yesterday riding out in the fields with my friend Sir Roger, we saw at a little distance from us a troop of gipsies. Upon the first discovery of them, my friend was in some doubt whether he should not exert the Justice of the Peace upon a band of lawless vagrants; but not having his clerk with him, who is a necessary counsellor on these occasions, and fearing that his poultry might fare the worse for it, he let the thought drop, but at the same time gave me a particular account of the mischiefs they do in the country in stealing peoples’ goods, and spoiling their servants. If a stray piece of linen hangs upon a hedge, says Sir Roger, they are sure to have it; if the hog loses its way in the fields, it is ten to one but it becomes their prey. Our geese cannot live in peace for them.
“‘If a man prosecutes them with severity, his hen-roost is sure to pay for it. They generally straggle into this part of the country about this time of the year, and set the heads of our servant maids so agog for husbands, that we do not expect to have any business done as it should be while they are in the country. I have an honest dairymaid who crosses their hands with a piece of silver every summer, and never fails being promised the handsomest young fellow in the parish for her pains. Your friend the butler has been fool enough to be seduced by them; and though he is sure to lose a knife, a fork, or a spoon, every time his fortune is told him, generally shuts himself up in the pantry with an old gipsy for above half an hour once a twelvemonth. Sweethearts are the things which they live upon, which they bestow very plentifully upon all those that apply themselves to them. You see now and then some handsome young jades amongst them,—the sluts have very often white teeth and black eyes.’