“Indeed,” says Moore the poet, in a humorous little book, _Tom Crib’s Memorial to Congress_, 1819, “the Gipsey language, with the exception of such terms as relate to their own peculiar customs, differs but little from the regular Flash or Cant language.” But this was magnifying the importance of the alliance. Moore knew nothing of the Gipsey tongue other than the few Cant words put into the mouths of the beggars, in _Beaumont and Fletcher’s Comedy of the Beggar’s Bush_, and _Ben Jonson’s Masque of the Gipseys Metamorphosed_,—hence his confounding Cant with Gipsey speech, and appealing to the Glossary of Cant for so called “Gipsey” words at the end of the _Life of Bamfylde Moore Carew_, to bear him out in his assertion. Still his remark bears much truth, and proof would have been found long ago if any scholar had taken the trouble to examine the “barbarous jargon of Cant,” and to have compared it with Gipsey speech. As George Borrow, in his _Account of the Gipseys in Spain_, eloquently concludes his second volume, speaking of the connection of the Gipseys with Europeans:—“Yet from this temporary association were produced two results: European fraud became sharpened by coming into contact with Asiatic craft; whilst European tongues, by imperceptible degrees, became recruited with various words (some of them wonderfully expressive), many of which have long been stumbling-blocks to the philologist, who, whilst stigmatising them as words of mere vulgar invention, or of unknown origin, has been far from dreaming that a little more research or reflection would have proved their affinity to the Sclavonic, Persian, or Romaic, or perhaps to the mysterious object of his veneration, the Sanscrit, the sacred tongue of the palm-covered regions of Ind; words originally introduced into Europe by objects too miserable to occupy for a moment his lettered attention,—the despised denizens of the tents of Roma.” But the Gipseys, their speech, their character—bad enough as all the world testifies—their history and their religious belief, have been totally disregarded, and their poor persons buffeted and jostled about until it is a wonder that any trace of origin or national speech exists in them. On the continent they received better attention at the hands of learned men. Their language was taken down, their history traced, and their extraordinary customs and practice of living in the open air, and eating raw or putrid meat, explained. They ate reptiles and told fortunes, because they had learnt it through their forefathers centuries back in Hindostan, and they devoured carrion because the Hindoo proverb—“_that which God kills is better than that killed by man_,”[11]—was still in their remembrance. Grellman, a learned German, was their principal historian, and to him we are almost entirely indebted for the little we know of their language.[12]