THE first notice of my pamphlet, under the title of _John Bunyan and the Gipsies_, that has come under my observation I found in the _Daily News_ of the 15th August. In the preface to it I said:—“This little publication is intended, in the first place, for the British Press,” as an appeal for a hearing on the subjects discussed in it. The time that elapsed between receiving the pamphlet and writing the notice of it was too short to enable almost any one to do justice to it, for that required time to think over it as having reference to my previous writings, to which the two letters to an English clergyman contained in it were merely an allusion. The writer is hardly correct when he speaks of the “long debated question of whether the illustrious author of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ was of Gipsy race.” This question has not been even once “debated” in England, so far as I, living in America, am aware of. I stated it fully in _Notes and Queries_ on the 12th December, 1857, and more fully in the _History of the Gipsies_, published by Sampson, Low & Co. in 1865; again in _Notes and Queries_ on the 27th March, 1875, with reference to the “fairish appearance” of Bunyan, and the existence of his surname (variously spelt) in England before the Gipsies arrived in it; then in _Contributions to Natural History and Papers on Other Subjects_, and _The English Universities and John Bunyan_, and _The Encyclopædia Britannica and the Gipsies_; then in _The Scottish Churches and the Gipsies_; and, finally, in the pamphlet alluded to. So that, instead of having “nothing to say” to the “fairish appearance” and the surname of Bunyan, I fully anticipated these questions, and disposed of them as they were brought forward by people at a venture, who seemed to know nothing of the subject they were treating. Much as I have published on this question, I am not aware that any one has ever attempted to set aside my facts, arguments, and proof that John Bunyan was of the Gipsy race. My “opponents” (so called) _assume_ that he was of the ordinary English race, and _therefore_ was, and must be held to have been, such till it is _proved_ that he was _not_ that, but of the Gipsy race, or something else; a most unreasonable position for any one to take up. So far from people stating the kind of _proof_ they want, they simply pass over everything I have written on the subject, and repeat their untenable, meaningless, and oft-refuted assertions. Thus the Rev. John Brown, of Bunyan Church, Bedford, apparently knowing nothing of the Gipsy subject, and disregarding everything printed on it, and looking neither to the right nor the left, makes out from the surname that the illustrious dreamer’s family was a broken-down branch of the English aristocracy, instead of, as Bunyan himself told us, “the meanest and most despised of _all_ the families in the land,” and “not of the Israelites,” that is, _not Jews_, but tinkers, that is, Gipsies of more or less mixed blood; so that his