in a fragment of
autobiography how at twenty-one he met a pretty Gypsy girl at sunset, was
guided by her to the tents, and "spent with these swarthy wanderers five
or six very happy days." He committed his money, fourteen pounds in all,
to the care of the Gypsy grandmother, the queen of the camp, who "was
faithful to the customs of the primitive gipsies, and would eat nothing
in the shape of animal food that had not died a natural death"! Mimy,
the Gypsy girl, and he make passionate love, till at last she proposes
"marriage for five years by breaking a piece of burnt earth." But the
stars and the Gypsy brethren forbid the banns, so they part eternally. It
is all the silliest moonshine, the most impossible Gypsies: no, Bulwer
Lytton deserves no place among the real Romany Ryes.

Of these a whole host remain. Francis Irvine, a lieutenant in the Bengal
Native Infantry, on the outward-bound voyage (1805) to India on board the
_Preston_ East Indiaman, took down a vocabulary of one hundred and thirty
Romany words from John Lee, a Gypsy recruit for the Company's European
force. No other case is known to me of a Gypsy revisiting the land of
his forefathers. John Hoyland (1750-1831), a Yorkshire Quaker, in 1814
began to study "the very destitute and abject condition" of the Midland
Gypsies, and wrote _A Historical Survey of the Customs_, _Habits_, _and
Present State of the Gypsies_ (York, 1816). He is said to "have fallen
in love with a black-eyed gipsy girl," but it does not appear that he
married her. Which is a pity; a Gypsy Quakeress would be a charming
fancy. That poor thing, John Clare, the Peasant-Poet (1793-1864), is
said to have "joined some gipsies for a time" before 1817; and Richard
Bright, M.D. (1789-1858), famous as the investigator of "Bright's
disease," must have known much of Gypsies both abroad and at home, to be
able to write his _Travels through Lower Hungary_ (1818). James Crabb
(1774-1851), Wesleyan minister at Southampton, and Samuel Roberts (1763-
1848), Sheffield manufacturer, both wrote books on the Gypsies, but were
Gypsy philanthropists rather than Romany Ryes. Still, Roberts had a very
fair knowledge of the language, and at seventy-seven "longed to be a
gypsy, and enter a house no more." Colonel John Staples Harriot during
his "residence in North Hampshire in the years 1819-20 was led to pay
considerable attention to a race of vagrant men, roaming about the high-
roads and lanes in the vi