“In the January number of the _Gypsy Lore Journal_ a passage is quoted from ‘a short sketch of the career’ of my husband (a little black pamphlet) which half suspects a remote drop of Gypsy blood in him. There is no proof that this was ever the case; but there is no question that he showed many of their peculiarities in appearance, disposition, and speech--speaking Romany like themselves. Nor did we ever enter a Gypsy camp without their claiming him: ‘What are you doing with a black coat on?’ they would say; ‘why don’t you join us and be our King?’”[2] Whether the affinity was one of blood or of nature does not greatly matter; in either case it lends a special interest to Burton’s study of the gypsy. Of _El Islam; or, The Rank of Muhammadanism among the Religions of the World_ there is little to be said. It is one of the oldest of the Burton MSS.; and though it bears no date, from internal evidence I judge it to have been written soon after his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853. It is, in fact, contemporary with his poem _The Kasîdah_, though I know not why the poem was published and the essay withheld. Probably Burton contemplated writing more fully on the subject. Muhammadanism in its highest aspect always attracted him. So long ago as 1848 we find him preparing for his Mecca pilgrimage, not only by learning the Koran and practising rites and ceremonies, but by “a sympathetic study of Sufi-ism, the Gnosticism of El Islam, which would raise me high above the rank of a mere Muslim.”[3] Lady Burton writes: “This stuck to him off and on all his life”; and, it may be added, gave a colour to his writings. Since Burton wrote this essay (now published for the first time) a change has taken place among thinking men in the estimate of El Islam among the religions of the world. Writers like Lane Poole, Isaac Taylor, and Bosworth Smith, to name no others, have cleared away many misconceptions concerning the “Saving Faith,” and have discussed its merits as a humanizing creed. But the testimony of a man like Burton, who by personal observation studied thoroughly the “inner life of the Muslim,” who absolutely lived the life of an Arab pilgrim, and penetrated to the Holy of Holies, of necessity carries peculiar weight.