The critic then passes to a second and a remarkable characteristic of the Gypsy race, the musical, which is now becoming known throughout Europe. At the Paris Exposition of 1878 the “nightingales of Koursk,” a troop of forty Romá from Moscow, followed the Hungarian _Cziganes_, and were equally admired. Even the celebrated Catalani appreciated the Chingáneh girl of Moscow, “who performed with such originality and true expression the characteristic melodies of the tribe”; and threw over her shoulders a papal gift in the shape of a rich Cashmere shawl. Most Englishmen now know that Mr. Bunn’s “Bohemian Girl,” thus unhappily translated from _La Bohémienne_ of St. George, was a Romni girl. The far-famed Abbé Liszt[124] attributed to these “tinklers” the chief _rôle_ in treating the musical _épopée_; but this opinion of the great master is opposed by the artistic M. Bartalus. I, however, incline to Liszt’s view. Let me note that the popular Romani word for musician, Lautar (plural Lautari), may either be the Persian Lútí,[125] or more probably a deformed offspring of the Arabic El `Aúd[126], which gave rise to our “lute.” Our critic holds that the Gypsy’s music, like his tales and poetry, is his own; whilst the matter of the songs and ballads is borrowed from Hungarians, Rumans, and even the unimaginative Turk: he also points out that many of the legends are cosmopolitan. When the Catalan Gypsy, met by the author in 1869 at St. Germain, told him that the _état_ (Dharma or religious duty) of the Romni-chel, the “sons of women” (_i.e._ their mothers), is to cheat their neighbours; that they learned this whole duty of man from St. Peter, who as our Lord’s servant habitually tricked and defrauded his Master; that _le dieu Jesus_, who established all human conditions on the creation day, had taught them, by example as well as precept, to beg and to vagabond naked-footed; that his tribe were veritable Christians “who knew only God and the Blessed Virgin”; and that all these things were written in the “Book of the Wanderings of our Lord,”--we recognize the old, old tale. The ancient Rom, like a host of other facetious barbarians, was solemnly hoaxing a simple student, a credulous “civilizee.” Still the joke has its ethnological value; it shows that the pseudo-Christian saints of the Gypsy Evangel are thieves and “sorners.” Highly characteristic also is the address to the Gypsy deity: “Good, happy God of gold!” On the other hand, such laical legends of the Apostles are current even amongst Christian peoples, from whom they may have been kidnapped by the Romá. Witness the French peasant’s tale of Jesus and St. Peter, the horseshoe and the cherries, which has for moral the market value of thrift.