M. Paul Bataillard--ominous name!--who has thus offered me battle in the _Academy_, is apparently an indefatigable _Tsiganologue_,[106] to use his own compound; and he seems to have been studying Chinganology since 1841. Of bookmaking on the Gypsy theme there is no apparent end; even the mighty “Magician of the North” proposed, we are told, adding his item to the heap. The reading public, indeed, seems to hold these _Hamaxóbioi_ an ever virgin subject; and since the days of “Gypsy Borrow’s” _Translation of St. Luke_ (1838),[107] _The Zincali, The Bible in Spain_ (1841), and other popular works, it has ever lent an ear to the charmer, charm he never so unwisely. A modern author was not far wrong when he stated: “A great deal of what is called genius has been expended upon the Gypsies, but wonderfully little common sense.”[108] And the subject has its peculiar charms. These “outlandish persons calling themselves Egyptians or Gypsies”; these cosmopolites equally at home in the snows of Siberia and in the swamps of Sennaar; these Ishmaelites still dwelling in the presence of their brethren, at once on the outskirts and in the very centres of civilized life; this horde of barbarians scattered over the wide world, among us but not of us; these nomads of a progressive age isolated by peculiarities of physique, language, and social habits, of absolute materialism, and of a single rule of conduct, “Self-will,” all distinctly pointing to a common origin; this phenomenon of the glorious epoch which opened a new thoroughfare to the “East Indies,” and which discovered the other half of the globe, is still to many, nay, to most men, an inexplicable ethnic mystery. Englanders mostly take the narrow nursery view of the “Black Man”; at the highest they treat him picturesquely in connexion with creels and cuddies, hammer and tongs, the tin-kettle and the katúna or tilt-tent. Continental writers cast, as usual, a wider and a more comprehensive glance. M. Perier, with French “nattiness,” thus resumes the main points of interest in the singular strangers: “_Une race extraordinaire, forte, belle, cosmopolite, errante, et cependant (?) pure, curieuse par conséquent, à tant de titres._” The Rumanians have deemed the theme worthy of poetry; witness the heroic-comic-satyric “Tsiganida,” or Gypsy-Camp, of Leonaki Diancu.[109]