Hast thou not noted on the by-way side, Where England’s loanings stretch unsoiled and wide, Or by the brook that through the valley pours, Where mimic waves play lightly through the flowers, A noisy crew far straggling through the glade, Busied with trifles, or in slumber laid, Their children lolling round them on the grass, Or pestering with their sports the patient ass? The wrinkled grandam there you may espy, The ripe young maiden with her glossy eye; Men in their prime--the striplings dark and dun, Scathed by the storms, and freckled by the sun; O mark them well when next the group you see, In vacant barn, or resting on the lea; They are the remnant of a race of old-- Spare not the trifle for your fortune told! For there shalt thou behold with nature blent A tint of mind in every lineament, A mould of soul distinct, but hard to trace, Unknown except to Israel’s wandering race; For thence, as sages say, their line they drew-- O mark them well! the tales of old are true! In these verses, which seem intended by Hogg as the commencement of a poem on the Gipsy history, he goes on to tell us that they were a tribe of Arabs that during the Crusades were induced to act as guides and allies of the Crusaders against Jerusalem, and were therefore compelled, on the retreat of the Christians, to flee too. It was not at all surprising that they should be regarded as the real descendants of Ishmael, for they have all the characteristics of his race,--an Eastern people, retaining all their features of mind or body in unchangeable fixedness--neither growing fairer in the temperate latitudes, nor darker in the sultry ones; perpetual wanderers and dwellers in tents; active, fond of horses, often herdsmen, artful, thievish, restrained by no principle but that of a cunning policy from laying hands on any man’s possessions; fond to enthusiasm of the chase after game, though obliged to follow it at midnight; as everlastingly isolated by their organic or moral conformation from the people amongst whom they dwell as the Jews themselves. The very prophecy seemed fulfilled in them, beyond what it could be in Araby itself, where they have been repeatedly subdued to the dominion of some conqueror, while this tribe seems in all countries to maintain its character as the genuine posterity of him who was to be a wild hunter in perpetual independence.