In opposition to this view of the great dreamer, we have the ferocious prejudice of caste against the name of Gipsy, that leads a person to feel, if not to say, “May I lose my right hand and may I be struck dumb if I admit that he was one of the race.” To him the subject of the Gipsies, in the development of the race from the tent upwards, and in its complex ramifications through society, has no interest. To comprehend it might even be beyond his capacity. To have it investigated and understood, and the people acknowledged, if it implied that John Bunyan was to be included as one of them, is what he will never countenance; on which account his wish is that the subject may remain in perpetual darkness. Proof is not what he wants, nor will he say what it should consist of. As regards John Bunyan personally, we have never had an explanation of what he told us he and his father’s family were and were not; but we may yet see it treated with fanciful interpretations and comments. Then it has been said at random that he was “not a Gipsy, but a tinker,” without considering who the tinkers really were, and forgetting that a person could have been both a tinker and a Gipsy; tinkering having been the Gipsy’s representative calling. Then we have the assertion that he could not have been a Gipsy because of his fairish appearance, and because his surname existed in England before the race arrived in it; and consequently that no one having a fairish appearance and bearing a British name can or could have been a Gipsy! Then we are told that people following, more or less, the established ways of English life during 120 years before the birth of Bunyan could not possibly have been related in any way to the Gipsies! And finally, certificates of marriages, births and deaths of people bearing British names, taken from a parish register, settle the question that people bearing them were not and could not have been others than ordinary natives of the British Isles, in no way related to the Gipsies! In that respect I wrote in the Appendix to the _Reminiscences_ as follows:— “The whole trouble or mystery in regard to Bunyan is solved by the simple idea of a Gipsy family settling in the neighbourhood of native families of influence, whose surname they assumed, and making Elstow their headquarters or residence, as was the uniform custom of the tribe all over Great Britain. This circumstance makes it a difficult matter, in some instances, to distinguish, by the Christian and surnames in county parish registers, ‘which was which,’ so far back as the early part of the seventeenth century” (p. 82). The pamphlet addressed to the “University Men of England” explains itself. I think that ministers of the Church of England should do more for the subject of the Gipsies, in the light in which I have presented it, than could be expected from those of other denominations.