Charles Godfrey Leland, flattered by the title "The Rye" ("Romany King," in reference to his work on gypsy languages) but known to the world as "Hans Breitmann," "spent much of his life in finding out what he was and nearly all the rest of it in trying to be what he was not," according to Ellis Oberholtzer. Leland developed a significant comic figure in Hans Breitmann, but he never tried to develop the figure beyond the initial characterization. Instead, Leland devoted much of his attention to anthropological, aesthetic, linguistic, philosophic, and self-instruction books; his interests were as diverse as his writing was prolific. Varied interests in humor, local legends, and the arts converged around the idealistic philosophical materialism he learned in the beer halls around the German universities of revolutionary Europe in 1848. Even a cynic like Breitmann, the Uhlan soldier, is somewhat idealistic and is thus a somewhat...