to a new
variety of true manhood. However frequently the last Englishman may die,
I hope it will be ever said of him, _Le roi est mort_,--_vive le roi_! I
have had talks with Lord Lytton on gypsies. He, too, was once a Romany
rye in a small way, and in the gay May heyday of his young manhood once
went off with a band of Romanys, and passed weeks in their tents,--no bad
thing, either, for anybody. I was more than once tempted to tell him the
strange fact that, though he had been among the black people and thought
he had learned their language, what they had imposed upon him for that
was not Romany, but cant, or English thieves' slang. For what is given,
in good faith, as the gypsy tongue in "Paul Clifford" and the "Disowned,"
is only the same old mumping _kennick_ which was palmed off on Bampfylde
Moore Carew; or which he palmed on his readers, as the secret of the
Roms. But what is the use or humanity of disillusioning an author by
correcting an error forty years old. If one could have corrected it in
the proof, _a la bonne heure_! Besides, it was of no particular
consequence to anybody whether the characters in "Paul Clifford" called a
clergyman a _patter-cove_ or a _rashai_. It is a supreme moment of
triumph for a man when he discovers that his specialty--whatever it
be--is not of such value as to be worth troubling anybody with it. As
for Everybody, _he_ is fair game.

The boat went up the Thames, and I remember that the river was, that
morning, unusually beautiful. It is graceful, as in an outline, even
when leaden with November mists, or iron-gray in the drizzle of December,
but under the golden sunlight of June it is lovely. It becomes every
year, with gay boating parties in semi-fancy dresses, more of a carnival,
in which the carnivalers and their carnivalentines assume a more decided
character. It is very strange to see this tendency of the age to unfold
itself in new festival forms, when those who believe that there can never
be any poetry or picturing in life but in the past are wailing over the
vanishing of May-poles and old English sports. There may be, from time
to time, a pause between the acts; the curtain may be down a little
longer than usual; but in the long run the world-old play of the Peoples'
Holiday will go on, as it has been going ever since Satan suggested that
little apple-stealing excursion to Eve, which, as explained by the
Talmudists, was manifestly the direct cause of all the f