One morning I was walking with Mr. Thomas Carlyle and Mr. Froude. We
went across Hyde Park, and paused to rest on the bridge. This is a
remarkable place, since there, in the very heart of London, one sees a
view which is perfectly rural. The old oaks rise above each other like
green waves, the houses in the distance are country-like, while over the
trees, and far away, a village-looking spire completes the picture. I
think that it was Mr. Froude who called my attention to the beauty of the
view, and I remarked that it needed only a gypsy tent and the curling
smoke to make it in all respects perfectly English.
"You have paid some attention to gypsies," said Mr. Carlyle. "They're
not altogether so bad a people as many think. In Scotland, we used to
see many of them. I'll not say that they were not rovers and reivers,
but they could be honest at times. The country folk feared them, but
those who made friends wi' them had no cause to complain of their
conduct. Once there was a man who was persuaded to lend a gypsy a large
sum of money. My father knew the man. It was to be repaid at a certain
time. The day came; the gypsy did not. And months passed, and still the
creditor had nothing of money but the memory of it; and ye remember
'_nessun maggior dolore_,'--that there's na greater grief than to
remember the siller ye once had. Weel, one day the man was surprised to
hear that his frien' the gypsy wanted to see him--interview, ye call it
in America. And the gypsy explained that, having been arrested, and
unfortunately detained, by some little accident, in preeson, he had na
been able to keep his engagement. 'If ye'll just gang wi' me,' said the
gypsy, 'aw'll mak' it all right.' 'Mon, aw wull,' said the
creditor,--they were Scotch, ye know, and spoke in deealect. So the
gypsy led the way to the house which he had inhabited, a cottage which
belonged to the man himself to whom he owed the money. And there he
lifted up the hearthstone; the hard-stane they call it in Scotland, and
it is called so in the prophecy of Thomas of Ercildowne. And under the
hard-stane there was an iron pot. It was full of gold, and out of that
gold the gypsy carle paid his creditor. Ye wonder how 't was come by?
Well, ye'll have heard it's best to let sleeping dogs lie."
"Yes. And what was said of the Poles who had, during the Middle Ages, a
reputation almost as good as that of gypsies? _Ad secretas Poli_, _curas
extendere noli_." (Never concern your soul as to the secrets of a Pole.)
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 aes 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, _a 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."