heath and glen. Who can doubt that the
much-quoted conversation in the twenty-fifth chapter of "Lavengro," gives
expression to much of Borrow's own philosophy?

"Life is sweet, brother."

"Do you think so?"

"Think so! There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon
and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the
heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"

"I would wish to die?"

"You talk like a gorgio--which is the same as talking like a fool--were
you a Romany chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed! A Romany
chal would wish to live for ever!"

"In sickness, Jasper?"

"There's the sun and stars, brother."

"In blindness, Jasper?"

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I
would gladly live for ever."

Like Bamfylde Moore Carew, though for a different reason, it was to the
gipsy life that Borrow turned after his unsuccessful literary work in
London. Disappointed and despondent, he fled the scenes that had
witnessed his failures. It is easy to imagine how great must have been
his sense of freedom when he cast off the shackles of city life, and
breathed again the air of the hills and pine-woods of rural England.
With the poet whose bones rest in the midst of the little town of his
birth, he felt and all his life maintained, that

"'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it. All constraint,
Except what wisdom lays on evil men,
Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes
Their progress in the road of science; blinds
The eyesight of discovery, and begets
In those that suffer it, a sordid mind
Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit
To be the tenant of man's noble form."

The gipsies of the first quarter of the present century possessed the
distinctive characteristics of their type in a far more marked degree
than their descendants of to-day. There were few amongst them who had
not a fair knowledge of the old Romany tongue, though they were utterly
ignorant of its source. Questioned as to where their ancestors came
from, they would tell you Egypt; and "business of Egypt" was their name
for the mysteries of fortune-telling, and the other questionable
proceedings they engaged in. Several of their families were fairly
well-to-do in the eyes of their tribe, though the fact was carefully
concealed from inquisitive gorgi