[The English Gipsies and Their Language by Charles G. Leland]@TWC D-Link bookThe English Gipsies and Their Language CHAPTER I 1/24
.
INTRODUCTORY. The Rommany of the Roads .-- The Secret of Vagabond Life in England .-- Its peculiar and thoroughly hidden Nature .-- Gipsy Character and the Causes which formed it .-- Moral Results of hungry Marauding .-- Gipsy ideas of Religion.
The Scripture story of the Seven Whistlers .-- The Baker's Daughter .-- Difficulties of acquiring Rommany .-- The Fable of the Cat .-- The Chinese, the American Indian, and the Wandering Gipsy. Although the valuable and curious works of Mr George Borrow have been in part for more than twenty years before the British public, {1} it may still be doubted whether many, even of our scholars, are aware of the remarkable, social, and philological facts which are connected with an immense proportion of our out-of-door population.
There are, indeed, very few people who know, that every time we look from the window into a crowded street, the chances are greatly in favour of the assertion, that we shall see at least one man who bears in his memory some hundreds of Sanscrit roots, and that man English born; though it was probably in the open air, and English bred, albeit his breeding was of the roads. For go where you will, though you may not know it, you encounter at every step, in one form or the other, _the Rommany_.
True, the dwellers in tents are becoming few and far between, because the "close cultivation" of the present generation, which has enclosed nearly all the waste land in England, has left no spot in many a day's journey, where "the travellers," as they call themselves, can light the fire and boil the kettle undisturbed.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|