Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/635

Rh GIPSIES teller’s powers. The Gipsy erone can no longer persuade the yeonian’s wife to bury her treasure in the earth, and return in a fortnight’s time to ﬁnd it——gone. Those halcyon days of macinzin are passed by; the servants’ hall is now the only El Dorado left. Enclosure Acts have struck a deadly blow at English Gipsydoni, driving the wanderers from breezy common and turf-edged lane to the smoky suburbs of great towns, or at best the outskirts of some watering place. Here, surrounded by Gentiles, the younger generation forget the wisdom of the Egyptians, relinquish time—honoured customs, and, wedding with the sons and daughters of the land, widen the stream of Pmniani blood, and so diminish its “ depth.” Several accounts have been furnished of Romani marriages, but they rarely tally, and some (Bright’s, l3orrow’s, and Sinisoifs) do not bear quotation. On the Continent one common feature is the breaking by the chief of a flower- crownerl pitcher, from whose fragments, as they are many or few, he argues the fortunes of the bridal pair. There are many curious Gipsy practices relating to death and burial, such as waking the corpse, burning the deceased’s effects, the fasting of his kinsfolk, and a species of faint. The earliest record of Gipsies burning the property of their dead occurs in the Arznzml Itref/ister for 1773, p. 142: “The clothes of the late Diana Boswell, queen of the Gipsies, value £50, were burnt in the ;Iint, Southwark, by her principal courtiers, according to ancient custom” (cf. Liebich, p. 55). Abstention from ﬂesh or some other delicacy is not always a sign of mourning for the dead Crofton in Papers of the Jlan. L-it. Club, 1877) ; b11t its most interest- ing forni is where a Gipsy wife or child for ever renounces the favourite delicacy of the dead husband or parent. Like motives prompt the dropping of the dead Gipsy’s name entirely out of use, any survivors who happen to bear the same changing it to another. Much might be written of
 * 1 kind of ceremonial purity prescribed by Gipsy law, and

in-licated in the language by the distinction between c/til.-lo, “dirty,” and mo/.-ado, “unclean.” To wash a tablecloth with clothes is molcrulo, since it is connected with food; and a German Gipsy woman may not cook for four months after childbirth, while a vessel touched by the skirt of a woman’s dress is held to be deﬁled. But with one other widespread practice we must take our leave of Gipsy cus- toms, that, namely, of leaving at a cross—road a handful of grass or leaves, a heap of stories, a stick or some such mark (pat;-in, “ leaf ”) to guide the stragglers of the band. See Liebicli, p. 90, and Smart and Crofton, p. 199; and com- pare “Pola,” in Sleeman’s I?amaseeana, or a l'0caIml(n'_2/ Qf the T/mg/s (Calcutta, 1836). Clmrcu-ter.—The Gipsy character, strange medley of evil and of good, presents itself as black and hateful to the outside world, whilst to the Romani race it is all that i.- fair and lovable. “ There ’s nothing worse than mumply Gentiles” is a saying often in Gipsy mouths, which affords a clue to much that is puzzling in the Gipsy’s nature. He is at war with mankind, for centuries his oppressors, and, all being fair in war, may plunder and beguile at will, so that he be not caught. Gipsies’ light-heartedness and courtesy are patent to all men ; but only to true or adopted members of the tribe are their inmost hearts revealed. T-heir principal faults are childish vanity, professional cun- n1ng',indolence (caused by the absence of ambition), and a hot passionate temper. But they are as ready to forgive as they are quick to resent a wrong; and before implicit conﬁdence their cunning gives place to inviolate honour, a fact borne strongly out by an incident in the Life of the actor _Charles Mayne Young (p. 186, ed. 1871). Their family affection is intensely strong, prompting a parent never to chastise a younger child, a grown—1ip son meekly to take a thrashing from his father; and they are lavishly generous G1 7 to such as are poorer than themselves, even though Gentiles. Their love of nature reveals itself in a hundred quaint, pectic phrases, in a familiarity with beasts and herbs ; their love of dumb creatures in the number of their pets. Quick and versatile, all Gipsies readily adapt themselves to any state o_f life; they have so wonderful a gift of tongues that formerly it was reckoned against them for a proof of sorcery. That hitherto the race has produced, outside the realm of music, none but mute geniuses, is rather due to lack of education than of ability ; but “ Zingaro ” seems to have only been a nickname of the Quentin Matsys of the South,Antonio Solario(1382—1-I-35), and John Bunyan from parish registers does not appear to have had one drop of Gipsy blood (cf: Notes and Queries, 5th ser. vol. ii.). 1’le_y.s-ir1ue.—Outwardly as within Gipsies present strong contrasts, some being strangely hideous, others very beau- tiful, though not with a regular, conventional beauty. Finely proportioned, they are as a race of middle stature, but lithe and sinewy, insensible to cold or wet, capable of supporting great fatigue. They pride themselves on their small hands and feet; corpulence rarely occurs, and only with the older women. The hair, black or dark brown, inclines to coarseness, is often frizzled, and does not soon turn grey ; the complexion, a tawny olive, was compared by the Plymouth Pilgrims (1622) to that of the Indians of North America. The teeth are of dazzling whiteness and perfect regularity, the cheekbones high; and the aquiline nose is overhung by a strongly-marked brow, knit often in deep lines of thought. But the most striking feature is the full, dark eye, now lustreless, then changing to an expres- sion of mysterious, childlike sorrow, presently blazing forth with sudden passion. As is the case in other Oriental races, the Gipsies early develop and early fade. See, in the llrcIu'vfz'£r Ant/zropologie (1872), M. Isidor Kopernicki’s learned and exhaustive treatise on Gipsy craniology. Tlzcorics as to 0rz'gin.—Several attempts have been made to identify Gipsies with nomad Indian tribes: Grellmann, for example, discovers them in the Sﬁdras, Richardson in the Eats (Asiatir: IZcscarcIz(’s, vol. vii. 1784), Leland in the Doms, and B. R. Mitra in the Bedi_v:'is (lllcmoirs of London Anllirop. Soc., vol. iii., 1870). These theories, however, need 11ot detain 11s long; they rest merely on analogies, real or imagined, between the manners of Gipsies and- sucli Indian vagraiits, and not on the evidence of language. Nor, were it even shown that any or all of these pariahs speak Roman? among themselves, would such a discovery throw of necessity mneli light on the origin of our European Gipsies; it might simply prove that India has its Gipsy tribes. It is otherwise with the identifica- tion of Gipsies with the Jats, who in the Punjab alone numbered (1871) 1,309,399,—a theory started by Pott, elaborated by Batail- lard, and supported by Newbold, Sir H. Rawlinson (I’r0cecdz'7zgs tf tlw Gcogr. Soc., vol. i., 1857), Professor dc Goeje (B1_'idragc tot do Gcschicdcnis dcr Zigcmicrs, Amst., 1875), Captain Burton (Acadcmg/,. March 27, 1875), and a. writer in the Edinbm'gh Rcviczc (July 1878). About 420 A.D., says Firdousi (circa 1000), the Persian monarch Behrani G111‘ imported 10,000 minstrels from India, assigning them lands and cattle. But they, wasting their substance, angered the king, who bade them take their instruments, and roaming through the land procure by their songs a livelihood, “ wherefore the Lari- nov wander about the world." Haniza, the Arab historian of Ispalian (C. 940), had already told how Behram dispersed through the cities of his realm 12,000 Indian musicians, “ whose de- scendants are known as Zuth ;" and of three writers who repeat the tale lIirkhond (15th century) calls the musicians Djatl. Thus Lziri (mod. Pers. “ Gipsy”) appears to be synonymous with- Zulh or Jat, the name on the one hand of Damascus Gipsies ($3), on the other of an agricultural and cattle-breeding race inhabiting the valley of the Indus. Neither are records lacking of west- ward migrations of Jats from the Indus, as in 714 to Mopsuestia and Antioch, while in 810 we hear of them in the Tigris valley, in 834 in the marshes of lihuzistan, in 855 in the territory of the Byzantine empire (Gocje). Jat theorists differ as to the date of the great migration that gave Europe its Gipsies, the Edinburgh I.’cvz'eu' writer placing it at 1025, while Sir Henry Rawlinson regards our- Gipsies as lineal descendants of Firdousi’s Lﬁri. These writers, how- ever, all agree in making the Gipsies J ats; but none liayeessayed the necessary comparison of Romani and J ataki (the idiom _of the living Indian J ats), though Captain Burton himself has publisl1e_d :1 gr-.irnma1' of the latter in the Journal of the Boinbrty _ls1'atic .b'0cu(_-, .'.—7S