emies.

He kept good company from his youth up. Wistful or fancifully envious
admiration for the fortunate simple yeomen, or careless poor men, or
noble savages, or untradesmanlike fishermen, or unromanized _Germani_, or
animals who do not fret about their souls, admiration for those in any
class who are not for the fashion of these days, is a deep-seated and
ancient sentiment, akin to the sentiment for childhood and the golden
age. Borrow met a hundred men fit to awaken and satisfy this admiration
in an age when thousands can over-eat and over-dress in comfort all the
days of their life. Sometimes he shows that he himself admires in this
way, but more often he mingles with them as one almost on an equality
with them, though his melancholy or his book knowledge is at times
something of a foil. He introduces us to fighting men, jockeys, thieves,
and ratcatchers, without our running any risk of contamination. Above
all, he introduces us to the Gypsies, people who are either young and
beautiful or strong, or else witch-like in a fierce old age.

Izaak Walton heard the Gypsies talking under the honeysuckle hedge at
Waltham, and the beggar virgin singing:

"Bright shines the sun, play, beggars play!
Here's scraps enough to serve to-day."

Glanvill told of the poor Oxford scholar who went away with the Gypsies
and learnt their "traditional kind of learning," and meant soon to leave
them and give the world an account of what he had learned. Men like
George Morland have lived for a time with Gypsies. Matthew Arnold
elaborated Glanvill's tale in a sweet Oxford strain. All these things
delight us. Some day we shall be pleased even with the Gypsy's carrion-
eating and thieving, "those habits of the Gypsy, shocking to the moralist
and sanitarian, and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach," which
please Mr. W. H. Hudson "rather than the romance and poetry which the
scholar-Gypsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him." Borrow's
Gypsies are wild and uncoddled and without sordidness, and will not soon
be superseded. They are painted with a lively if ideal colouring, and
they live only in his books. They will not be seen again until the day
of Jefferies' wild England, "after London," shall come, and tents are
pitched amidst the ruins of palaces that had displaced earlier tents.
Borrow's England is the old England of Fielding, painted with more
intensity because even as Borrow was travelling the change was