Since the former edition went to press, I have learned that the New Forest has long been a great haunt of gipsies, particularly of one remarkable family--the Stanleys. I hear with pleasure that the Home Missionary Society has likewise taken up the cause of the gipsies in various parts of the country with a good deal of spirit, and a volume has been put into my hands, entitled “The Gipsies’ Advocate.” This is edited by the Rev. James Crabbe, a worthy dissenting minister of Southampton, and has run into a third edition. Mr. Crabbe seems a most earnest and indefatigable apostle of this neglected people. Hoyland’s “Survey of the Gipsies,” together with some painfully interesting circumstances connected with the execution of one of them, turned his attention to their case so early as 1827. He soon fell in with one of the New Forest clan, William Stanley, who, having in his youth been a soldier, had become acquainted with the Bible through attending church, and eventually became so anxious to christianize his gipsy kinsmen, that he went to travel about amongst them, reading the Bible in their tents. Mr. Crabbe soon formed a committee in Southampton for the reclamation of the gipsies, visiting them in their camps, and persuading them to allow their children to be put to school, and to learn trades. He visited the camps in various places, and sought them out, and preached to them at Epsom Races, and in the hop-grounds at Farnham. Stanley served as his messenger and assistant. The committee seems to have met with great success. At the date of the edition which I quote, 1832, there were twenty-three reformed gipsies living in Southampton, and upwards of forty attending divine service there. The gipsies in almost all instances had evinced the most lively sense of the attention shewn them, and a desire to avail themselves of the privileges of learning to read and of hearing preaching. This little volume contains also some interesting accounts of the attempts to civilize the gipsies in Russia and Germany, and particularly of the zealous endeavours of the Countess von Reden of Buchwald in Silesia. But from the gipsies of the continent we must return to those of the New Forest of England; of whom Miss Bowles, now Mrs. Southey, was kind enough to send me the following curious particulars:--