With all that has been said, the words which I have put in italics have a curious meaning—that the Gipsies in giving their language to “strangers” “may be willing with all their heart to communicate them”! I have explained this subject at length in the Disquisition (pp. 281 and 282) in reference to Mr. Borrow and others, not in regard to the willingness and stupidity, but the shuffling of the Gipsy in giving the meaning of words, although isolated and abstract ideas might occasionally puzzle some of them; for they translated to Mr. Borrow the Apostles’ Creed, sentence by sentence. The Lord’s Prayer, given by Mr. Borrow, Mr. Leland admits to be “pure English Gipsy” (p. 70). I do not think Mr. Leland states, with what stock of words and how acquired, he first approached the Gipsies, and how he used them, to get inside of the guard of the tribe. {18} In the Preface to _The English Gipsies and their Language_, Mr. Leland says that all that it contains “was gathered directly from the Gipsies themselves” (v.); that he did not take “anything from Simson, Hoyland, or any other writer on the Romany race in England”; and that nothing is a “re-warming of that which was gathered by others” (x.). All that appears strictly true; yet he says nothing of how he was “put on the track for repeating or illustrating an ‘oft-told tale.’” But he says:— “If I have not given in this book a sketch of the history of the Gipsies, or statistics of their numbers, or accounts of their social condition in different countries, it is because nearly everything of the kind may be found in the works of George Borrow and Walter Simson” (xi.). He did not find much of the kind mentioned in Mr. Borrow’s books, so far as I remember, and omitted to say that I had written very fully on the points stated. It would have been interesting to have been told by Mr. Leland about his being “puzzled and muddled” at what he saw at Cobham Fair, how he came to write, nine years before that, as follows:— “There have been thousands of _swell_ Romany chals who have moved in sporting circles of a higher class than they are to be found in at the present day” (p. 92).—“It may be worth while to state, in this connection, that Gipsy blood intermingled with Anglo-Saxon, when educated, generally results in intellectual and physical vigour” (p. 174).—And where was it that he found the idea that John Bunyan was a member of the Gipsy race (p. 63), if it was not as elaborately given in my Disquisition?