The Zincali: or an Account of the Gypsies of Spain; with an Original Collection of their Songs and Poetry, by George Borrow. Two Volumes in one. New York: Wiley & Putnam.

Our list of tribes in America indigenous¹ and imported wants the Gypsies, as the Flora² of the western hemisphere wants the race of heaths. But as it is all one to the urchin³ of six years, whether the fine toys are to be found in his father’s house or across the road at his grandfather’s, so we have always domesticated⁴ the Gypsy in school-boy literature from the English tales and traditions. This reprinted London book is equally sure of being read here as in England, and is a most acceptable gift to the lovers of the wild and wonderful. There are twenty or thirty pages in it of fascinating romantic attraction, and the whole book, though somewhat rudely and miscellaneously put together, is animated⁵, and tells us what we wish to know. Mr. Borrow visited the Gypsies in Spain and elsewhere, as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and seems to have been commended to this employment by the rare accomplishment⁶ of a good acquaintance with the language of this singular people. How he acquired his knowledge of their speech, which seems to have opened their hearts to him, he does not inform us; and he appears to have prospered⁷ very indifferently in the religious objects of his mission; but to have really had that in his nature or education which gave him access to the gypsy gang, so that he has seen them, talked confidentially⁸ with them, and brought away something distinct enough from them.

He has given us sketches⁹ of their past and present manner of life and employments, in the different European states, collected a strange little magazine of their poetry, and added a vocabulary of their language. He has

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