of her face, is black as coal, and coarse as the tail of a horse, from which it seems to have been gathered. "There is no female eye in Seville can support the glance of hers, so fierce and penetrating, yet so artful and sly, is the expression of their dark orbs; her mouth is fine and almost delicate, and there is not a queen on the proudest throne between Moscow and Madrid who might not, and would not, envy the white and even rows of teeth which adorn it, which seem not of pearl, but of the purest elephant's bone of Multan. She comes not alone; a swarthy two year old bantling clasps her neck with one arm, its naked body half extant from the coarse blanket which, drawn around her shoulders, is secured at her bosom by a skewer. Though tender of age it looks wicked and sly, like a veritable imp of Roma. Huge rings of false gold dangle from wide slits in the lobes of her ears; her nether garments are rags, and her feet are cased in hempen sandals. Such is the wandering Gitána, such is the witch-wife of Multan, who has come to spae the fortunes of the Sevillian countess and her daughters." "Mention to me a point of devilry with which that woman is not acquainted!"-is the emphatic exclamation in which, on another occasion, our author sums up the total of the character of the wild creature we have thus allowed him to depict. Now comes her address to the lady of the house, and her own running commentary upon it, which, be it imagined or described, is sufficiently amusing: "Oh may the blessing of Egypt light upon your head, you high-born lady! (may an evil end overtake your body, daughter of a Busnee harlot!) and may the same blessings await the two fair roses of the Nile here flowering by your side! (may evil Moors seize them and carry them across the water!) O listen to the words of the poor woman who is from a distant country; she is of a wise people, though it has pleased the God of the sky to punish them for their sins by sending them to wander through the world. They denied shelter to the Majari, whom you call the queen of heaven, and to the Son of God, when they fled to the land of Egypt, before the wrath of the wicked king; it is said that they even refused them a draught of the sweet waters of the great river when the blessed two were athirst. O, you will say that it was a great crime; and truly so it was, and heavily has the Lord punished the Egyptians. He has sent us a-wandering, poor as you see, with scarcely a blanket to cover us. Oh, blessed lady, (accursed be thy dead, as many as thou mayst have!) we have no money to purchase us bread; we have only our wisdom with which to support ourselves and our poor hungry babes. When God took away their silks and gold from the Egyptians, he left them their wisdom as a resource that they might not starve. Who can read the stars like the Egyptians ? and who can read the lines of the palm like them? The poor woman read in the stars that there was a rich ventura for all of this goodly house, so she followed the bidding of the stars, and came to declare it. Oh, blessed lady, (I defile thy dead corse!) your husband is at Grenada, fighting with King Ferdinand against the wild Corohai, (May an evil ball smite him, and split his head!) Within three months he shall return with twenty captive Moors, round the neck of each a chain of gold. (God grant that when he enters the house a beam may fall upon him and crush him!) Your palm, blessed lady, your palm, and the palms of all I see here, that I may tell you all the rich ventura which is hanging over this house; (may evil light ning fall upon it and consume it!)” "Such," says our author, "was the Gitána in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, and much the same is she now in the days of Isabel and Christina." And having thus conveyed some tolerable idea both of the physique and the morale of the Gitána, it is but fitting that we should clothe her in her proper costume: "The dress of the Gitánas is very varied: the young girls, or those who are in tolerably easy circumstances, generally wear a black bodice laced up with a string, and adjusted to their figure, and contrasting with the scarlet-coloured saya, which only covers a part of the leg; their shoes are cut very low, and are adorned with little buckles of silver; the breast, and the upper part of the bodice, are covered either with a white handkerchief, or one of some vivid color; and on the head is worn another handkerchief, tied beneath the chin, one of the ends of which falls on the shoulder, in the manner of a hood. When the cold or the heat permits, the Gitána removes the hood, without untying the knots, and exhibits her long and shining tresses restrained by a comb. The old women, and the very poor, dress in the same manner, save that their habiliments are more coarse, the colors less in harmony, and more disorder in their array. Amongst them misery appears beneath the most revolting aspect; whilst the poorest Gitáno preserves a certain deportment which would make his aspect supportable, if his unquiet and ferocious glance did not inspire us with aversion."" The Gypsy race has been at sundry times the subject of severe persecutions. Their supposed acquaintance with the arts of magic, and their real thievish and mischievous propensities, were enough to make them unwelcome guests, wherever they might seek a home. In France, they met at the very first with a hostile reception, and such strong and deadly measures were taken for their ejection that they soon retired into Spain. Even there, various edicts have sought to drive them out, and the hatred of the common people has often threatened their existence; but, strong in the celerity of their movements, in their power of enduring every species of exposure and of privation, the Gitános stood their ground, until the storm had blown over, and a milder government sought to win those whom it could not subdue. The crimes of the Gypsies against the Busnee, or whites, and their deadly hostility to them, if once only defensive, are now comparatively aggressive and unprovoked. Still, this feeling prevails with great force among them. The Gypsy nurse hates the Christian child committed to her care, for its white blood, and is capable of doing it a secret injury which may ruin it both in mind and body for life. Had the people in general power to execute that which they have skill and malignity to invent, not a Christian would be left in the countries in which they reside. Yet it seems that, as a nation, they feel the influence of the milder treatment which they now receive; the strength and ferocity of determination which were called forth in them by severity and persecution have died away with these causes, and in many places the peculiarities of the race are gradually disappearing, while they themselves, so long the outcasts of society, are insensibly blending with the civilized fraternity of man. The love of wandering from place to place, the strong feeling of brotherhood among themselves, appear less and less in the modern Zincali of Spain. Those who are able to support themselves comfortably generally settle in the towns, and become more and more like other people. The bond of sympathy which once unit ed the richest and the poorest is slowly decaying, and giving place to indifference, or, one would hope, in time, to a wider and more comprehensive charity. One can scarcely, perhaps, see these changes without some degree of regret. Wearied with the uniformity of the mass of civilized men, the eye rests with a certain pleasure on the exaggerated and unharmonious traits of savage life. The wild man, whose religion is a superstition, whose virtue is an instinct, has yet, in his untrammelled liberty, a grandeur and dignity which belong not to the poor creature whose every action and word is influenced by laws often trivial and arbitrary; a grandeur which his many imperfections, and even his unpoetical eccentricities, cannot conceal. There is in the mind of the savage something of the faith and fearlessness of the little child, and they are beautiful, even though, like the child, he should at the same time be mischievous, destructive, and self-willed. True it is, these Gypsies have fallen far below the rank of such children of nature, and differ but little from the lower classes of civilized people, except perhaps in being more wretched and ignorant than they. Yet they are a curious type of humanity, a strong link between the present and the past, and we cannot but grieve a little, though unreasonably, to see the bundle of rods unbound, and unbound to be broken. Mr. Borrow complains somewhat of the want of fidelity in those highly wrought pictures of the Zincali which are given us in those novels of which they are the heroes or accessaries. He contends, and with reason, that the lofty and poetic diction with which they are generally invested, are not true to either their feelings or expressions. Without descanting upon the merits of the examples adduced by him, we will only observe that they are probably as faithful as the novelist's picture of human nature is apt to be. It is not man, as we see him every day, who is therein portrayed, but man in a sort of holiday dress, which may become him more or less, but never so well, we think, as his working clothes. It must be acknowledged that the brief space allotted for the development of character in the novel and the drama, seems to render this exaggeration necessary. The personages of the tale or play must be painted in quick, bold strokes, in strong light and shade; they must say that which they would never have said, and do that which they would never have done. Thus the highest truth must be sacrificed to that which shall be most distinguishing and striking, to bring out that inner nature of man which in life is rarely brought out in deeds and words. For, did it take us as long to find out men in works of fiction as in real life, the novel would be a biography, the drama, long and wearisome as life itself. a helping hand, and hid them, as he of old, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to arise and walk. The religion of the Gypsies appears to have been originally the Brahminism of India, a dim and mystical creed, of which they retain nothing save a belief in their own immortality, and in the existence of a God, whom, however, they have ceased to worship. Mr. Borrow anathematizes this wild and imperfect faith, and terms this god of the Brahmins "the father of all imposture;" but this view seems to us unjust. The deity of the wildest savThe Gypsy of the present day is age, abominable as may be his worship indeed a sad relic of barbarism; he and degraded his attributes, is yet but wears but the very rags and tatters of a defaced representation of the true humanity; yet such is our faith in that God who has written his name upon wondrous and indestructible texture, every heart. The hymn to Brahmah that we willingly believe his to be or to Buddh, which our author has anmade of the same stuff as our own. nexed to his translations of Gypsy We would fain regard him in his pres- rhymes, has in it some views so just ent position as the mere wreck and and noble, that we are tempted to vestige left by one of those mighty quote it partly for the sake of overprinciples, which, having slowly raised throwing his position. We cannot to themselves a monument from the speak of the correctness of the transcrude material of mind and matter, lation, yet we wish that the poem had pass on in their eternal march, leaving not been rendered into English doggrel the mass to crumble and return to no-brief blank lines would have given thingness, to be one day recombined a better idea of the wild measure and into new form and grandeur by the language of the original: Master workman of the universe. We would find in the distinguishing traits of his character some remnants of barbaric virtue. We would hope that he learned to steal when the whole human race was one mighty horde of robbers; that his vindictiveness of spirit was not at first an unprovoked hostility to the rest of mankind, but the impulse of resentment awakened by some cruel injury and outrage; that his indifference to the pleasures of sense, his strong attachment to his own race, and his native cunning, have one day deserved the names of austere temperance, of true patriotism, of deep sagacity. Of these qualities there remain few traces at the present day. The world itself has changed for the better, and these people have not changed with it, the great tide of barbaric life has ebbed, and has left these to wither on the shore,-the mass of mankind around them have risen, and stand erect, while these still retain their crouching and recumbent posture, clinging to their mother earth, until those who have combined to trample and weigh them down shall lend them "Should I Foutsa's force and glory, Or from dragon's kingly line, Foutsa, huge of form, shall flutter He, by Foutsa touched when sleeping, He would win, and from the three When a heart with kindness glowing Lust and flesh and vinous potion, If to mighty Foutsa lifted He but keep his heart and mind. He who views his cattle falling Unto fierce disease a prey, Hears his kindred round him brawling, And whose prayers, in countless number Is not this hymn the voice of aspiring and adoring humanity? Is there not in it something of revelation, at The sacred Codex of the Buddhists, which contains the canons of their religion. least of holy doctrine, and of heavenly consolation? It is a comfort to us, to read in these, and other such scat tered hieroglyphics, that God has always been with all his creatures in wisdom and in love, not only to create and sustain, but also to guide and instruct; that his wide bounty has never been bounded by the confines of either country or race; but that, spiritually as well as temporally, among the heathen, as well as among the Christian and the Hebrew, his rain has descended and his sun has shone, upon the evil and the good. It is a comfort to us, to distinguish a drop of his precious essence in the very dregs of humanity, to find his stamp upon its basest coin, for he made us in his own image, and even when we have passed through the hands of evil spirits we are no counterfeits. One word concerning Mr. Borrow's mission among the Zincali. It is one upon which he cannot look back but with pleasure. He has left behind him a valuable legacy, and a monument to his own erudition and industry, in various portions of the Scriptures rendered by him into the dialect of the Rommany. He seems, moreover, in his efforts to enlighten them, to have acted with forbearance and consideration, and to have endeavored to accommodate his expositions of Christian doctrine to their peculiar character and position. We gather from his own account of his intercourse with them, that he did not dazzle and bewilder their dim vision with the deeper mysteries and dogmas of the church; but that he went among them as a brother, gently and kindly reproved their evil practices, and strove with patience and discretion to guide them to even a remote perception of the truth, following his own sense of their wants and capacities, rather than the guidance of a wildly zealous spirit. Nor do we doubt that his labor, lost as it may have seemed to him, will produce the wished-for result. The good seed, sown in so good a spirit, cannot fail, we would fain hope, to bring forth at least some fruit, even in this stony ground. And those even who mocked at his pious endeavors to enlighten them, will perhaps one day gladly and gratefully acknowledge the debt they owe him who visited them when sick and in prison, for their own sake, and for the sake of One greater than they. 9 VOL. XI. NO. XLIX. It is well perhaps that Mr. Borrow does not himself entertain any very sanguine hopes for the realization of such a result, so that he is at least safe from all danger of disappointment. "I can scarcely flatter myself," he says, "with having experienced any success in my endeavors. Indeed I never expected any, or at least any which I myself could hope to witness; I knew too well the nature of the ground on which I was casting seed. True it is that it may not be lost, and that it may eventually spring up in this or that direction, as barley has been dropped from the cerements of a mummy, and has sprung up, and displayed vitality after lying choked and hidden for two thousand years." We are tempted to quote two or three passages from which the reader may form some idea of the nature of the task our good missionary had to perform, in his attempt to exert on such minds the slightest influence of a religious character. At Madrid, on one occasion, he receives a visit from Pépa and Chicharona, already mentioned, accompanied by two daughters of the former; one of whom, a very remarkable female, was called La Tuérta, from the circumstance of her having but one eye, and the other, who was a girl of about thirteen, La Casdamì, or the scorpion, from the malice she occasionally displayed. The following scene then occurred: "Myself. I am glad to see you Pépa; what have you been doing this morning?" "Pepa. I have been telling baji, and Chicharona has been stealing à pastésas; we have but little success, and have come to warm ourselves at the braséro. As for the One-eyed, she is a very sluggard, (holgazana,) she will neither tell fortunes nor steal.' "The One-eyed.- Hold your peace, mother of the Bengues; I will steal, when I see occasion, but it shall not be à pastésas, and I will hokkawar (deceive) but it shall not be by telling fortunes. If I deceive, it shall be by horses, by jockeying. You know already what I am capable of, If I steal, it shall be on the road-I'll rob. yet knowing that, you would have me tell fortunes like yourself or steal like Chicharona. Me diñela cónche (it fills me with fury) to be asked to tell fortunes, and the next Busnee that talks to me of bájis I will knock all her teeth out.' "The Scorpion. My sister is right; |