Although novelists, dramatists, and poets are particularly fond of trying to paint the gipsies, it cannot be said that many of them have been successful in their delineations. And this is because the inner and the outer life of a proscribed race must necessarily be unlike each other. Meg Merrilies is no more a gipsy than is Borrow’s delightful Isopel Berners. Among the characteristic traits of the Romany woman, Meg does no doubt exhibit two: a wild poetic imagination and a fearlessness such as women rarely display. But no one who had been brought into personal contact with gipsy women could ever have presented Meg Merrilies as one of them. In the true Romany chi poetic imagination is combined with a homeliness and a positive love of respectability which are very curious. Not that Meg, noble as she is, is superior to the kind of heroic woman that the Romany race is capable of producing. Indeed, the great speciality of the Romanies is the superiority of the women to the men—a superiority which extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that gift of music for which the gipsies are noticeable. Even in Eastern Europe—Russia alone excepted—where gipsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany extraction, it is the men and not, in general, the women who excel. This, however, may simply be the result of opportunity and training. It is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over language, in breadth of view regarding the “Gorgio” world around them, that the Romany women, in Great Britain at least, leave the men far behind. In character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imagine a gipsy hero is not easy. The male gipsy is not without a certain amount of courage, but it soon gives way, and in a physical conflict between a gipsy and an Englishman it always seems as though ages of oppression have damped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefighters have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment” with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow her husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her without returning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among the gipsies. It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities of the gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualities among the men of which we have been speaking. The lack of masculine chivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistible impulse among the women for taking their own part without appealing to the men for aid. Also this may account for the strong way in which a