tempt for those who
were not middle-class Englishmen seemed unmitigated. Speaking of the
Gypsies, to whom the schools were open and the laws kinder, he points out
that, nevertheless, they remain jockeys and blacksmiths, though it is
true they have in part given up their wandering life. But "much," he
says, "will have been accomplished if, after the lapse of a hundred
years, one hundred human beings shall have been evolved from the Gypsy
stock who shall prove sober, honest, and useful members of society,"
_i.e._, resembling the Spaniards whom he so condemned.

But if men love a big fellow at the street corner bellowing about sin and
the wrath to come, they love him better if he was a black sinner before
he became white as the driven snow. Borrow reprimanded Spaniard and
Gypsy, but he also knew them: there is even a suspicion that he liked
them, though in his public black-coated capacity he had to condemn them
and regret that their destiny was perdition. Had he not said, in his
preface, that he had known the Gypsies for twenty years and that they
treated him well because they thought him a Gypsy? and in another place
referred to the time when he lived with the English Gypsies? Had he not,
in his introductions, spoken of "my brethren, the Smiths," a phrase then
cryptic and only to be explained by revealing his sworn brotherhood with
Ambrose Smith, the Jasper Petulengro of later books? He had said,
moreover, in a perfectly genuine tone, with no trace of missionary
declamation:

"After the days of the great persecution in England against the Gypsies,
there can be little doubt that they lived a right merry and tranquil
life, wandering about and pitching their tents wherever inclination led
them: indeed, I can scarcely conceive any human condition more enviable
than Gypsy life must have been in England during the latter part of the
seventeenth, and the whole of the eighteenth century, which were likewise
the happy days for Englishmen in general; there was peace and plenty in
the land, a contented population, and everything went well."

If a man wishes to condemn the seven deadly sins we tolerate him if in
the process they are sufficiently well described. If Borrow described
the tinker family as wretched, and their donkey as miserable, he added,
"though life, seemingly so wretched, has its charms for these outcasts,
who live without care and anxiety, without a thought beyond the present
hour, and who sleep as sound in