The two great successes amongst Borrow’s Romany characters are undoubtedly Mrs. Petulengro’s mother (old Mrs. Herne) and her grandchild Leonora, but these are the two wicked characters of the group. It is impossible to imagine anything better told than the attempt of these two to poison Lavengro: it is drama of the rarest kind. The terrible ironical dialogue over the prostrate and semi-conscious Lavengro, between the child-murderess and the hag-murderess who have poisoned him, is like nothing else in literature. This scene alone should make “Lavengro” immortal. In no other race than the Romany would a child of the elf-like intelligence and unconscious wickedness of Leonora be possible; but also it must be said that in no other race than the Romany would be possible a child like her who is made the subject of my sonnet, “A Gypsy Child’s Christmas,” printed in the “Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society”—a sonnet which renders in verse a real incident recorded by my friend before alluded to:— Dear Sinfi rose and danced along “The Dells,” Drawn by the Christmas chimes, and soon she sate Where, ’neath the snow around the churchyard gate, The ploughmen slept in bramble-banded cells: The gorgios passed, half fearing gipsy spells, While Sinfi, gazing, seemed to meditate; She laughed for joy, then wept disconsolate: “De poor dead gorgios cannot hear de bells.” Within the church the clouds of gorgio-breath Arose, a steam of lazy praise and prayer, To Him who weaves the loving Christmas-stair O’er sorrow and sin and wintry deeps of Death; But where stood He? Beside our Sinfi there, Remembering childish tears in Nazareth. Perhaps Borrow’s pictures of the gypsies, by omitting to depict the Romany woman on her loftier, her tragic side, fail to demonstrate what he well knew to be the Romany’s great racial mark of distinction all over Europe, the enormous superiority of the gypsy women over the gypsy men, not in intelligence merely, but in all the higher human qualities. While it is next to impossible to imagine a gypsy hero, gypsy heroines—women capable of the noblest things—are far from uncommon. The “Amazonian Sinfi,” alluded to in Dr. Hake’s sonnet, was a heroine of this noble strain, and yet perhaps she was but a type of a certain kind of Romany chi. It was she of the bantam cock and “the left-hand body blow” alluded to above.