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And yet, he concluded, he "would put George Borrow above every other writer on the Gypsies. . . . He communicates a subtle insight into Gypsydom that is totally wanting in the works mainly philological of Pott, Liebich . . . and their confreres." Hindes Groome was speaking, too, from the point of view of a Romany student, not of a critic of human literature.
In Germany, as Mr Liebich declares, drinking-cups are kept by the Gipsies with superstitious regard, the utmost care being taken that they never fall to the ground. "Should this happen, the cup is never used again. By touching the ground it becomes sacred, and should no more be used. When a Gipsy cares for nothing else, he keeps his drinking-cup under every circumstance."
Richard Liebich, in his book, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und in ihrer Sprache, tells his readers that the only indication of a belief in a future state which he ever detected in an old Gipsy woman, was that she once dreamed she was in heaven. It appeared to her as a large garden, full of fine fat hedgehogs.
But the wife maintained, appealing to Mr Liebich for confirmation, that the great God no longer reigned, having abdicated in favour of the Son, while the husband declared that the Great older God died long ago, and that the world was now governed by the little God who was, however, not the son of his predecessor, but of a poor carpenter.
Mr Liebich further declares, that while there is really nothing in it to sustain the belief, this extraordinary reverence and regard for the dead is the only fact at all indicating an idea of the immortality of the soul which he has ever found among the Gipsies; but, as he admits, it proves nothing.
For its origin we turn to the case of Susannah Kühnel. "We had then for our master," said Jacob Liebich, "an upright and serious man, who had the good of his pupils much at heart." The name of the master was Krumpe. "He never failed," continued Liebich, "at the close of the school to pray with us, and to commend us to the Lord Jesus and His Spirit during the time of our amusements.
And strange as it may seem to you, reader, his intercourse with Christians has all over Europe been so limited, that he seldom really knows what religion is. The same Mr Liebich tells us that one day he overheard a Gipsy disputing with his wife as to what was the true character of the belief of the Gentiles.
"This is," says Mr Liebich, "unquestionably very earthly, and dreamed very sensuously; reminding us of Mahommed's paradise, which in like manner was directed to the animal and not to the spiritual nature, only that here were hedgehogs and there houris."
Especially in Prague he found the highest and noblest aristocracy ready to bid him welcome. Weber paid a visit to Liebich, director of the Prague theater, almost as soon as he arrived in town. The invalid director greeted him warmly. "So, you are the Weber! I suppose you want me to buy your operas. One fills an evening, the other doesn't. Very well, I will give fifteen hundred florins for the two.
Once a man named Charles Augustus was arrested as a beggar and suspected Gipsy, and brought before Mr Richard Liebich, who appears to have been nothing less in the total than the Furstlich Reuss- Plauenschem Criminalrathe und Vorstande des Furstlichen Criminalgerichts zu Lobenstein in fact, a rather lofty local magistrate.
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