In regard to John Bunyan having been of the Gipsy race, I find that I stated the question in _Notes and Queries_ on the 12th December, 1857; so that it has stood over, like a “case in Chancery” under the old system, for a quarter of a century, unattended to! This little publication is intended in the first place for the British Press, although I cannot be expected to send every journal a copy of it. Each publication in its sphere has an influence, which should be exercised in the way indicated; for here there is no opening for the display of those passions that too frequently enter into discussions generally. For myself personally (the last to be considered), although it is thirty-one years since I left Great Britain, I should still have some rights there; and especially among high-toned people, who should remember that one of the ends for which they were created was to see justice done to an absent person. NEW YORK, _July_ 1, 1882. JOHN BUNYAN. TWO LETTERS TO AN ENGLISH CLERGYMAN. {7} I. YOUR letter of the 14th April reached me after some delay. When you wrote it I presume you had not given your fullest consideration to the question raised by you. For when John Bunyan said that his “father’s house was of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,” and that they were “not of the Israelites,” that is, “not Jews,” he could not possibly have meant that they were what are generally called “natives of England.” Who in Bunyan’s time were the “meanest and most despised of _all_ the families in the land”? No one can doubt that they were the Gipsies, who were numerous and well known to Bunyan. Does it not then follow that this particular Bunyan family were Gipsies, in whatever ways and at whatever times its blood may have got mixed with native, and whatever its social development? And who then living in England—when Jews were excluded from it—would have taken so much trouble as Bunyan did—that is, exhausted every means at his command—to ascertain whether their family were Jews but Gipsies? This Bunyan did, and recorded the fact of his having done it after he had become an old man. Here we have no alternative but to conclude that _John_ Bunyan’s family were of the Gipsy race; whatever natives of a similar surname there might have been in the county or neighbourhood before the Gipsies arrived there. It is even possible in this case, as it has taken place in others, that a native family had been changed into a Gipsy one by the male representative of it marrying a Gipsy, but not necessarily one following an outdoor life, and having the issue passed into the Gipsy tribe in the ordinary way of society. There is neither proof to show nor reason for holding that John Bunyan’s family, in the face of what he told us, were _not_ Gipsies, but of the ordinary race of Englishmen; for which reason I think that an honourable minded man should not maintain it, nor allow it to be asserted in his presence.