The Romanitshels' Didakais' and folk-lore gazette, reflecting also the opinions of tinkers, travellers, gawjos, show-folki and posh-rats.
- Date:
- [1912?]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The Romanitshels' Didakais' and folk-lore gazette, reflecting also the opinions of tinkers, travellers, gawjos, show-folki and posh-rats. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![and taught them some of their arts—platting leather, making whistles out of certain twigs, setting snares and so on. They always came to bid us good-bye and express their gratitude before they moved off and told us that they expected to “fall in ” with some of their friends at a certain common or cross roads a few hours latter. Cleanness of mind and cleanliness of body, softness of speech, poetic and expressive eyes, courteous, grateful, and interesting—these were some of the characteristics of my friends the gypsies, who are a little section of a people unto themselves. :=-o<=]a=i ii ii i=n=xxr=iE^~ir5o5in RICHARD MIDDLETON: MAN AND ARTIST- ^llPOain Dfcilfc I have before me two books, “ Poems and Songs” and “The Ghost Ship and Other Stories,” the work of Richard Middleton, who died in Brussels in December of last year under poignant circumstances, to the great grief of those who knew him and to the permanent loss of English letters, I met Richard Middleton some six years back, when I was secretary of the Society of New Bohemians, a group of novelists, verse-writers, journalists and miscellaneous literary types. Middleton made an instantaneous appeal by his youth and charm of intellect to a group of men borne to a degree, but not too jaded to appreciate a fresh new gift. At that time, I fancy, Middleton had taken no decisive steps in literature but he had written verses of a rare sweetness. As he was at twenty-nine when he died, so he was at twenty-three, a surprisingly mature figure of a man, tall and heavy in build and strongly bearded. The nose and mouth were youthfully small, however, and the eyes were the clear eyes of childhood, sometimes merry and mischievous, sometimes wistful and troubled. In his quiet moments he had a curious note of deprecation and shyness in his voice; in a more characteristically wide-awake mood his voice was loud and masterful, and of a resonance, in public places, sometimes embarassing to conventional friends. There are a number of good talkers in London—the brothers Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, Edgar Jepson, Norreys Connell, Conrad Noel, to mention a few that spring to mind instantaneously—but Richard Middleton had a quality of tingling unexpectedness in his talk which distinguished him from all other varieties of good talkers whatsoever. His mind was a remarkably sane, lucid and logical one, but his imagination was whimsically and delightfully freakish, giving continual expositions of realism in fairyland, of flashes of joy shooting through forests of nightmare. He was a genuine talker, not an expert monologuist with a prepared text. His inspirations were often minted from the remarks of others, a process in which small change was often transmitted into bright gold. In tavern or tea-house he attracted startled attention, first of all, by his striking appearance, a great hulk of a man. with roughly curling black beard and finely chiselled scarlet lip, dressed with more than Carlylean carelessness, with the large soft felt hat common at once to Nonconformity and Poetry, with delightfully crinkled garments, especially a kind of short corsair cloak These are not the externals of polite latter-day life and even more polite latter-day literature, and they always excited uneasy recognition from the immense Just-So class, who were further outraged by extravagant remarks pitched by Middleton in the tone of a bo’sun in a half-gale. But hearers of intelligence were generally startled into a laugh after a](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22473750_0039.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
