The first vocabulary of the ‘Cant Language,’ or English Germania, appeared in the year 1680, appended to the life of _The English Rogue_, a work which, in many respects, resembles the _History of Guzman d’Alfaráche_, though it is written with considerably more genius than the Spanish novel, every chapter abounding with remarkable adventures of the robber whose life it pretends to narrate, and which are described with a kind of ferocious energy, which, if it do not charm the attention of the reader, at least enslaves it, holding it captive with a chain of iron. Amongst his other adventures, the hero falls in with a Gypsy encampment, is enrolled amongst the fraternity, and is allotted a ‘mort,’ or concubine; a barbarous festival ensues, at the conclusion of which an epithalamium is sung in the Gypsy language, as it is called in the work in question. Neither the epithalamium, however, nor the vocabulary, are written in the language of the English Gypsies, but in the ‘Cant,’ or allegorical robber dialect, which is sufficient proof that the writer, however well acquainted with thieves in general, their customs and manners of life, was in respect to the Gypsies profoundly ignorant. His vocabulary, however, has been always accepted as the speech of the English Gypsies, whereas it is at most entitled to be considered as the peculiar speech of the thieves and vagabonds of his time. The cant of the present day, which, though it differs in some respects from the vocabulary already mentioned, is radically the same, is used not only by the thieves in town and country, but by the jockeys of the racecourse and the pugilists of the ‘ring.’ As a specimen of the cant of England, we shall take the liberty of quoting the epithalamium to which we have above alluded:— ‘Bing out, bien morts, and tour and tour Bing out, bien morts and tour; For all your duds are bing’d awast, The bien cove hath the loure. {351} ‘I met a dell, I viewed her well, She was benship to my watch: So she and I did stall and cloy Whatever we could catch. ‘This doxy dell can cut ben whids, And wap well for a win, And prig and cloy so benshiply, All daisy-ville within. ‘The hoyle was up, we had good luck, In frost for and in snow; Men they did seek, then we did creep And plant the roughman’s low.’