s
into a circle and cheating them. Stealing and lying were first
principles in their code of life. And yet because Borrow held that
Nature did not forgive faults, much less allow men to profit by them, he
could not but ask whether those gipsies were so thoroughly vicious as was
supposed. One day, in a conversation with a gipsy girl under a hedge--one
of the strangest talks in the chronicle of literature--he elicited the
fact that domestic honour was held among them to be a primary law, and
female unchastity an unpardonable offence. And he left that conversation
on record for our admonition. That, you will say, is no new ideal to
English women. As an ideal, no. But our English practice is something
very different. And we have lived to see literature challenge even the
ideal.

And then there was the secret, an open one indeed, but hidden from many
Englishmen of Borrow's generation, though it had been recently proclaimed
by the gentle and thoughtful poet who lay buried in Borrow's native town
of Dereham, that though civilisation arose from life in cities, yet the
joy of life was apt to escape the city liver. The vagabond gipsy had
something which man was the better for having, a delight in the sun and
air and wind and rain. We in Norwich are not likely to forget those
magical words put into the mouth of the gipsy on Mousehold Heath,
"There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars,
brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is
very sweet, brother." Allied with this love of nature was a keen
satisfaction in manly exercises, walking, riding, boxing, swimming, which
Borrow contrasted somewhat scornfully with the baser sports of dog
fighting and cock fighting, then in vogue among gentlemen. And as a
consequence of this love of the open air and the open country Borrow
found in the gipsies a sense of freedom and independence, and so a self-
respect, which he compared unfavourably with the mingled arrogance and
servility of many city-bred people.

Here then we have some of the elements of the ideal, largely drawn from
the despised gipsies, which Borrow held up before his generation. He
does not indeed promulgate it as the whole duty of man, though we who
have learned the lesson may think he is apt to over-emphasise it. He
does not ignore other qualities of manliness. He holds that from the
root of a self-respecting freedom, if the environment be but favourable,