This singular race of people, of whom Grellman calculates there are not less than 700,000 in Europe, seemed to demand a more comprehensive account in the Rural Life of England, than has hitherto been given in any one work. Many of my readers, I am persuaded, will regard them for their antiquity, the mystery of their origin, the strangeness of their history and life, with deeper feelings than they have hitherto done; and it may be well for such as live in those parts of the country which the gipsies haunt, to ask themselves whether something may not be done by education, and other means, to reclaim those wild denizens of heaths and lanes, or to give them some greater portion of the knowledge and benefits of civilized life. A considerable number have sent their children to schools during the winters in London; and these children, though compared by one of their schoolmasters, at their first entrance, to wild birds suddenly put into a cage, and ready to beat themselves against the bars, having no sense of restraint, soon became not only perfectly orderly, amongst the very first for quickness and avidity in learning, but expressed the utmost regret when obliged to leave at spring. I once saw a woman in a gipsy tent, reading the Bible to a circle of nine children, all her own! and though, on coming near, her blue eyes and light hair shewed her to be an English woman, the daughter, as I found, of a gamekeeper, who had married one of the Boswell gang, yet the interest which the children took in her reading of the Bible, and the interest which she assured me the whole camp took in it, were sufficient evidence that it is only for want of being taught that they still remain in ignorance of the best knowledge. They have been so long treated with contempt and severity, that they naturally look on all men as their enemies. For my part, when I see a horde of them coming on some solitary way, with their dark Indian faces, their scarlet-cloaked women, their troops of little vivacious savages, their asses and horses laden with beds and tents, and, trudging after them, their guardian dogs,--I cannot help looking on them as an Eastern tribe, as fugitives of a most ancient family, as a living enigma in human history--and feeling that, with all their Arab-like propensities, they have great claims on our sympathies, and on the splendid privileges of a christian land. GIPSIES OF NEW FOREST.