hole life of all classes had become more frivolous,
daring, and reckless; an inordinate longing after enjoyment, an
excessive pleasure in burlesque jesting, in music and dancing, in
singing and mimic representations, was general in the wealthy towns.
Thus many of the race of strollers contrived to make their peace with
the burgher society. They became domestic fools in the courts of
princes, the merry-andrews of the towns, associates of the town pipers,
and players to the bands of Landsknechte.

But besides the players and their followers, there appeared along the
roads of the armies, and in the hiding-places of the woods, other
children of misfortune less harmless and far more awful to the people,
first of all the gipsies.

The gipsies, from their language and the scanty historical records that
there are of them, appear to be a race of northern border Indians, who
lost their home, and their connection with their Indian relatives, at a
time when the transformation of the ancient Sanscrit into the modern
and popular languages had already begun. In their wanderings towards
the west, which had gone on for centuries, they must have lived in
continual intercourse with Arabians, Persians, and Greeks, for the
language of these people has had a marked influence on their own. They
were possibly, about the year 430 but more probably about 940, in
Persia. They appeared about the twelfth century as Ishmaelites and
braziers,[41] in Upper Germany. They were settled in the fourteenth
century in Cypress, and in the year 1370, as bondsmen is Wallachia. The
name of Zingaro or Zitano, is a corruption from their language; they
still call themselves Scindians, dwellers on the banks of the Indus;
their own statement also, that they came from Little Egypt, may be
correct, as Little Egypt appears then to have denoted, not the valley
of the Nile, but the frontier lands of Asia.

In the year 1417, they came in great hordes, with laughable pretensions
and grotesque processions, from Hungary, into Germany, and shortly
afterwards into Switzerland, France, and Italy. A band of three hundred
grown-up persons, without counting the children, proceeded as far as
the Baltic, under the command of a duke and count, on horseback and on
foot; the women and children sitting with the baggage on the carts.
They were dressed like comedians, and had sporting dogs with them as a
sign of noble birth; but when they really hunted, they did so without
dogs, and wit