I have spoken of Mr. Leland’s “confident assertions,” but I have space merely to allude to some of them. Among these are the following:—That there is no mystery about the origin of the Gipsies (p. 331), and that “it is a matter of history that, since the Aryan morning of mankind, the Romany have been chiromancing” (p. 225); that “among those who left India were men of different castes and different colours, ranging from the pure Northern invader to the Negro-like Southern Indian” (p. 24); that the Gipsies in Egypt have lost their tongue (p. 296); that the English Gipsy cares not a farthing “to know anything about his race as it exists in foreign countries, or whence it came” (p. 34); and that there is hardly a travelling company of dancers, musicians, singers, or acrobats, or theatre “in Europe or America in which there is not at least one person with some Romany blood” (p. 332). This at least is common, I dare say very common. On one occasion I looked over the show-bill while in MS. of an English Gipsy company who travelled in America with a small panorama. {19a} The conclusion which I drew of Mr. Leland after reading his Cyclopædia article was that, apart from the language, he knew little of the _subject of the Gipsies_. The knowledge of the language has given him the entrée into the circle of a certain class of the Gipsies, leading to a “flash-in-the-pan” knowledge of them; but not constituting him a reliable guide on the whole question under consideration; for, in keeping with his “confident assertions” generally, he disposes of it by saying that “the child is perhaps born who will see the last Gipsy.” {19b} As long as Mr. Leland has stuck to his subject he has confirmed what I said in the work published by me, although he has made no acknowledgment of it in any way. Even on the subject of the tinkers in England, he—so far as he may be considered an authority—has confirmed what I said of their being Gipsies of mixed blood:—“These are but instances of, I might say, all the English tinkers. Almost every old countrywoman about the Scottish Border knows that the Scottish tinkers are Gipsies” (p. 508). He also speaks of John Bunyan having been a “half-blood Gipsy tinker” (p. 213). He was only justified in saying that he was of “mixed blood”; but he made no allusion to my long argument (pp. 313 and 506–523) in defence of it, which I published in _Notes and Queries_ on the 12th December, 1857, and illustrated it in two shorter articles in the early part of 1858, in which the outline of the _History of the Gipsies_ was given; so that the question of Bunyan’s nationality has been before “all England” for a quarter of a century unanswered. What I wrote in _The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies_ is equally applicable to Mr. Leland:—