I may exaggerate the feeling in question when I say that no publication will admit the subject into its columns, nor any one allude to it publicly, or even privately, without something like losing social caste. As a consequence, no member of the race that can help it will own the blood unless he wants it to be known for his benefit. The rest of it, in its various mixtures of blood, characters, and positions in life, are born and live and die incognito so far as the rest of the world are concerned. This is a state of things that should not exist in England; but there seems no remedy for it unless the question can meet with discussion, and be taken up by persons of influence in whom the public has confidence. As I have said on another occasion, “The question at issue is really not one of evidence, but of an unfortunate feeling of caste,” that bars the way against all investigation and proof. John Bunyan’s nationality forms only a part of the subject of the “Social Emancipation of the Gipsies,” but a very important part of it; but all that might be said of it has no meaning to such as, looking neither to the right nor the left, will listen to no representation of any kind of Gipsy but such as they have been accustomed to see in the open air in England. It would be uncandid on my part if I refrained from saying that Bedford and its people have been cited before the bar of the world to show reason why John Bunyan should not be admitted to have been “the first (that is known to the world) of eminent Gipsies, the prince of allegorists, and one of the most remarkable of men and Christians.” They have an opportunity of receiving, first or last, the illustrious pilgrim, not as the progeny of (as some have thought) native English vagabonds, but as a Great Original in whatever light he might be looked at.