gipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye,” the young English gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the ‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often in such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy in the Romany woman is seen. The unconquerable virtue of the Romany chi was often commented upon by Borrow; and, indeed, every observer of gipsy life is struck by it. Seeing that the moment the Romanies are brought into contact with the Gorgio world they adopt a method of approach entirely different from the natural method—natural to them in intercourse with each other—it is perhaps no wonder that the popular notion of the gipsy girl, taken mainly from the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong. With regard to the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared on the boards, save the characters in Tom Taylor’s ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’ In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright, devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman. The fact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really exists there is but little devilry. “Romany guile,” which is well defined in the gipsy phrase as “the lie for the Gorgios,” does not prevent gipsy women from retaining some of the most marked characteristics of childhood throughout their lives. This, indeed, is one of their special charms. In his desire to depict the supposed devilry of the Romany woman, Prosper Mérimée has perpetrated in ‘Carmen’ the greatest of all caricatures of the gipsy girl. A mere incarnation of lust and bloodthirstiness is more likely to exist in any other race than in the Romanies, who have a great deal of love as a sentiment and comparatively very little of love as a movement of animal desire. In G. P. R. James’s ‘Gipsy’ (1835) there are touches which certainly show some original knowledge of Romany life and character. The same may, perhaps, be said of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Bird of Passage,’ but the pictures of gipsy life in these and in all other novels are the merest daubs compared with the Kiomi of George Meredith’s story ‘Harry Richmond.’ Not even Borrow and Groome, with all their intimate knowledge of gipsy life, ever painted a more vigorous picture of the Romany chi than this. The original was well known in the art circles of London at one time, and was probably known to Meredith, but this does not in any way derogate from the splendour of the imaginative achievement of painting in a few touches a Romany girl who must, one would think, live for ever.