three to run across the country’, and a little nearer Willenhall, on the north side of the road, is Bentley Hall, the ‘hall’ from which the postillion must have been returning when overtaken by the thunderstorm.  The church attended by Borrow and his gypsy friends, when Mrs. Petulengro horrified the sexton by invading the nobleman’s vacant pew, may confidently be identified with Bushbury Church, which has all the features described by Borrow.  It is rather over three miles’ distance from the dingle, has a peal of bells, a chancel entrance, and is surrounded by lofty beech-trees.  The vicar in 1825 was a Mr. Clare, but whether of evangelical views and a widower with two daughters, the present vicar is unable to inform me.  ‘The clergyman of M—, as they call him,’ probably took his name from Moseley Court or Moseley Hall, country seats in the parish of Bushbury.

It is as a contribution to philology, Borrow tells us in the Appendix, that he wishes ‘Lavengro’ and this book to be judged.  Fortunately for himself, his fame rests upon surer foundations.  A great but careless linguist, Borrow was assuredly no philologist.  ‘Hair-erecting’ (haarsträubend) is the fitting epithet which an Oriental scholar, Professor Richard Pischel, of Berlin, finds to describe Borrow’s etymologies; while Pott, in quoting from the ‘Zincali,’ indicates his horror by notes of exclamation; or, when Borrow once in a way hits on the right etymon, confirms the statement with an ironical ‘Ganz recht!’  Though Borrow had read Borde, it was reserved for a Viennese scholar, Dr. Zupitza, to discover that the specimens of ‘Egipt speche,’ in our original Merry-Andrew’s ‘Boke of Knowledge,’ were in reality good

Anglo-Romany.  And whatever may have been Lavengro’s vaunted acquaintance with Armenian, it was apparently insufficient to enable him to identify any of the Armenian elements in the gypsy language.

Touching Borrow’s knowledge of Romani, it must be confessed that while he has been the means of attracting others to the study of that interesting tongue, his own command of it was of the slightest.  He never mastered ‘deep’ (or inflected) Romani, and even his broken gypsy is a curious Borrovian variety, distinct from the idiom of the tents.  No gypsy ever uses chal or engro as a separate word, or talks of the dukkering dook or of penning a dukkerin.  His genders are perversely incorrect, as in the title of the present book; and his ‘Romano Lavo-Lil: Word Book of the Romany or English Gypsy Language’ probably contains more ‘howlers’ than any other vocabulary in the world.  He is responsible for the creation of such ghost-words as asarlas, ‘at all, in no manner’ (mistaking helpasar les for help asarlas, pp 18, 110); cappi, ‘booty, gain’ (to lel cappi, pp 28, 176 = ‘to get blankets’); ebyok, ‘sea’ (? the gypsy questioned, mishearing ‘ebb-eye’ for ‘ebb-tide’); is, ‘if,’ p. 51; kokkodus, ‘uncle’ (perhaps mistaking some such phrase as ‘like my koko does’ for ‘like my kokkodus’); lutherum, ‘sleep’; medisin, ‘measure’ (perhaps because medicine is measured out); moskey, ‘a spy’ (? mistaking dikamaski for dik! a moskey); o, ‘he’ (mistaking kai jivela for kai jivvel o, p. 53); pahamengro, ‘turnip’ (probably mistaking pusamengro, ‘pitchfork,’ for the turnip it was used to uproot); pazorrhus, ‘indebted’ = ‘trust us’); pios, ‘drunken as a health’ (aukko tu [to] pios, p. 78 = ‘here’s fun’); sar, ‘with’; sherrafo, ‘religious, converted,’ pp. 89, 194 (really ‘chief, principal,’ from shero, ‘head’); sicovar, ‘eternally’ (si covar ajaw, p. 90 = ‘so the thing is’); sos, ‘who’ (= ‘what’s’); talleno, ‘woollen, flannel’ (mistaking talleno chofa, p. 93, ‘under-skirt’

for ‘flannel petticoat’), etc.  Perhaps the most amusing instance of all is the word hinjiri in ‘Lavengro.’  When Mrs. Herne hanged herself, Petulengro says that she ‘had been her own hinjiri,’ [0z3] and the word is explained by Professor Knapp as the feminine of hinjiró, ‘executioner,’ from djandjir, ‘a chain.’ [0z4]   But there is no such word as hinjero, and hinjiri is merely the English ‘injury’ with a superfluous aspirate.

On the Sunday evening after his conversation with Ursula, Borrow, moved by his discovery of the original meaning of the gypsy word patteran, falls into a strange train of thought.  ‘No one at present,’ he says, ‘knew that but myself and Ursula, who had learnt it from Mrs. Herne, the last, it was said, of the old stock; and then I thought what strange people the gypsies must have been in the old time.  They were sufficiently strange at present, but they must have been far stranger of old; they must have been a more peculiar people—their language must have been more perfect—and they must have had a greater stock of strange secrets.  I almost wished that I had lived some two or three hundred years ago, that I might have observed these people when they were yet stranger than at present.  I wondered whether I could have introduced myself to their company at that period, whether I should have been so fortunate as to meet such a strange, half-malicious, half good-humoured being as Jasper, who would have instructed me in the language, then more deserving of note than at present.  What might I not have done with that language had I known it in its purity?  Why, I might have written books in it!  Yet those who spoke it would hardly have admitted me to their society at that period, when they kept more to

themselves.  Yet I thought that I might possibly have gained their confidence, and have wandered about with them, and learnt their language and all their strange ways, and then—and then—and a sigh rose from the depth of my breast; for I began to think, “Supposing I had accomplished all this, what would have been the profit of it? and in what would all this wild gypsy dream have terminated?”’

It is one of the ironies of fate that Borrow, neither then nor thirty years later, when he made his pedestrian tour through Wales, should have known that there was still in that country a gypsy tribe who had preserved the language of two or three hundred years ago.  He might have met gypsies who had spoken to that Romani patriarch Abram Wood; he might have told us the origin of the mysterious Ingrams, for one of whom he was himself mistaken; [0z5] he might have learned from Black Ellen some of the three hundred folk-tales with which she is credited; he might have sat at the feet of that fairy witch Alabina the Melení, or have described ‘Taw’ as a girl in her teens.  We may sigh for the pictures which the word-master would have given us of this people, but the sigh is almost one of relief when we think of the escape of the exquisite tongue which Borrow would have tortured and